Day 1

Vacation finally arrived and our first weekend we were busy gathering and packing up things we would need for our first week on the boat. We biked to biked to Ikea for small things we would need. We vacuumed packed all of our clothes and bedding. This gave us more room in our travel bags to pack more things. Weird how you always tend to use all the space you have in your travel bags. Looking back on vacuum packing, this, might not of been wise since that meant we could pack more thus making our bags heavier 😞. Luckily we found and bought a foldable hand truck we could use to carry all our bags. This made life so much easier walking from bus to train to bus to boat.

Monday was travelday. We spent most of the day just traveling up to Henån and to our boat. We first took Buss4you for a nice little 3.5 hour ride to Gothenburg, then an hour train ride from Gothenburg to Stenungsund, and then finally an hour bus ride from Stenungsund to Henån. It was not a difficult as it sounds (the hand truck made it real easy) but it did take us about 6 hours to finally reach our destination. Below is our home comming to our boat Viking Goddess.

Once we arrived at the boat, the first thing to do was to clean the boat. No one had been on the boat or done anything with it for a few months. So it needed a good cleaning. The previous owner left behind quite a lot of crap. I guess he thought we would need this stuff but some of the things he left were

• Instruction book for his laptop, toaster, and 2 vaccuum cleaners (None of which was left on the boat)
• A sleeping bag for a toddler
• A bunch of fishing gear that was rusted up and no good
• A lot of fluids that were in unmarked containers
• Plastic containers that did not really fit in the storage areas

So we took all this to the dump and started fresh on our boat. VG does not like being cluttered 😊. We finished dusting and cleaning the v-berth so we would have some where clean to sleep for the first night.

Day 2 - 6

The next few days were basically the same.

• More cleaning
• Finding out what switches did what
• Tracing hoses so we knew what hoses were connected to what
• Tracing electrical cabels
• Looking over the running rigging and noting what lines does what

Not quite the glamorous part of sailing. Here is what it looked like at one point on the boat when we tried to figure out where the bilge pump and hose were located.

Sailing

With all the work going on, we did get a few chances to take the boat our for some sailing. Since this was the first time taking her out, we did not film that much since we wanted to be fully concentrated on the boat.

While we were cleaning and getting to know our boat, we meet our next door neighbor, who had just purchased a 44' Najad. He was in the middle of preparing her because he was sailing her to Kiel Germany. After talking for a while, he asked if we would be interested in crewing and help him sail his boat there. We said yes immediately. This story to follow.