Sailing Course

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Last week Anna and I started the förarintygskurs, boat certificate course. Basically it is a boating certificate for recreational boating.

Completion of the course certifies that the certificate holder proves to have theoretical knowledge about bringing pleasure boat inshore and sheltered waters, primarily in daylight and good visibility, as well as how to show good seamanship.

The course started 16-10-12 and will go for 7 weeks plus examination. Here is some of the course material

This course can be considered equivalent to the course Sailing Skills & Seamanship offered by the US Coast Guard.

This is only the first course of many theoretical courses and winter time is perfect time to take them. With winter approaching and the temp dropping close to zero, a nice warm room learning about sailing is fine with me :=)

Najad Production Hall

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This is a little late but as they say, "Better late then never". Anyway, Najad invited us up to Uddevalla to see their new production hall and on the 23rd September 2016, we drove there. This is where they are going to produce their new Najad 395 AC/CC.

The production hall should be ready in about 1.5 months. Thats when the first boats should start arriving and being worked on. They make the hull somewhere else along with the upper deck. Then they will ship it here where they will put the hull and top deck together. They will also start installing everything else.

Here is a list of the options that we received. Now we need to decide what options we want. There is a lot to read up on.

Najad-395-ac_cc-preliminary-list.xlsx

Port with year round living

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Got some good news the other day. We got a reply from Nörra Yacht clubb that they do not mind if someone lives there year round. This is good news. The bad news is, they could not say when a place would become available. So it could be 1, 2 or more years :-( But the tone sounded like within a couple of years, a spot could become available. This gives us a little time to find the boat we want. We have already decided to sell our Range Rover. We will be sad to see it go but I sure we will get over it quickly once we get our boat :-)

Finding a port to live year round in

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I am not sure how it is in other parts of the world, but here in Sweden, it seems like they do not want anyone living on their boat year round. I live Malmö and have contacted almost all the ports within a resonable distance to Malmö. All of them say basically the same thing.

No we do not allow year round living. The season is from April to October. You can have you boat in the water year round or pull it out for winter.

That seems a little strange to allow you to have your boat in the water year round, but not be allowed to live on it during the winter.

Without be able to live year round on the boat, creates a big problem with us wanting to sell everything and live on one. There's got to be a port that allows this somewhere here in the southern part of Sweden.

Öppna Varv

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This past weekend we attended Öppnna Varv. It is an in water boat show at the Hallberg-Rassy boat yard in Ellös Sweden. Hallberg-Rassy invites other boat manufactures there as well. So there were boats from Bavaria, Hanse, Jeanneau and many others.

Hallberg-Rassy also had the production shop open so that you could walk around and see the boats being constructed.

We have been debating about if we wanted an aft cockpit or a center cockpit. After looking at them we have decided that a center cockpit is what we want. We get a bigger aft cabin and to us, it feels like we are more protected and secure having the cockpit in the center.

Saturday was a nice sunny day and there were a lot of people there. I guess that is because it was suppose to rain on Sunday. But this worked out to our advantage. After we went around on Saturday looking at all the boats, gathering information, we had a some questions that we wanted to get answered and planned to talk more details with HR and Najad on Sunday.

To our relief, it did not rain like the new predicted and the crowds disappeared. There was only a light drizzle early in the morning and then nothing the rest of the day :-) After talking to the sales person on the HR 40 MK II, we went over to look more at the Najad 411cc. Unbeknownst to us, the VD of Najad was there showing the boat to people. We went below to look at the interior and he started asking us what we were looking for. After explaining what it is that we are wanting to do, he offered to take us to the Najad workshop to show us a Najad boat that was under construction.

This was great. We got to see how well the Najad boats are built and Anna and I were impressed with how well Jörgen Ottosson answered all of our questions. Jörgen also told us about a new design that is coming out soon, 395cc. After hearing about this model, it sounds like this will be a perfect fit for us. Needless to say, we can say that we are sold on Najad and we will be getting a Najad.