Sailing through crazy weather from Helsingør to Gothenburg

This Saturday/Sunday we sailed from Helsingør in Denmark to Gothenburg in Sweden. It's roughly 108 nautic miles (to Saltholmen), and we spent roughly 20 hours on the trip, that's an average speed above 5 knots. At one point the GPS speed showed 9.5 knots, that's the highest number I've ever seen on this boat. We've just had it lifted up for cleaning the hull, that helps quite a lot on the speed.

Most of the sailing was through the night time, and I didn't take any photos at all. The photo below is from after I anchored up, while I was on my way in the dhingy to Gothenburg.

Photo taken by tobixen - position: geo:57.634338,11.869413 (geohack) - 2018-08-26 15:24:19 localtime - CC BY-SA 4.0 - full quality

The weather was completely bonkers. I had only checked wind speed and wind direction on windy.com, probably I should have done more research on the forecast. According to the forecast, the wind direction should be fairly steady from the west (port side), while the magnitude of the wind would vary between 3 m/s and 12 m/s. With this in mind, I tried to waste as much water as possible from the starboard water tanks while doing dishes. There was a risk that we would have to sail quite sharply against the wind at some point, so I planned to keep the course a bit more to the port than needed to have more navigational freedom if the wind direction would become less favorable.

We started with a relatively strong tailwind; it didn't take long until the wind direction turned and became unfavorable, forcing us to put the course quite much to the starboard, towards land. As I had hoped for, the wind direction changed again before we got close to land. The wind did quite some changes in direction and magnitude over the trip. Local patches with very heavy rain could clearly be seen on the radar - but the visual sightings of rain did not always match up with the radar image. Sometimes we encountered local patches with quite strong wind. At some point we were keeling more than 30 degrees, but at that point I didn't bother trying to reduce the area of the main sail as I knew the wind would be over soon. Prior to the next rough patch I did reduce the sail area quite much more. We saw rainbows and sunshine. At one point it was really raining cats and dogs for like half an hour. At one point I had set the auto pilot in "wind wane"-position, we were quite far from land and it was quite dark, I didn't notice the wind direction was changing with around 180 degrees - we sailed in the completely wrong direction for like ten minutes until I discovered, then followed a period of several hours with relatively strong wind from the stairboard side. Then followed a period of several hours there was not so much wind compared to the waves, the sails would flap due to the waves, so we rolled them in and went by engine before we had sufficient wind from the port side to use the sails again.

Twice the auto pilot lost the control of the boat and we went from around 120 degrees tailwind and very little keeling to 60 degrees headwind and very much keeling in a very short moment ... throwing my poor wife out of the bed while she was trying to sleep. I took over manual steering and threw the rudder as much over as I could - at one of the times this happened, it felt like I was staying with the rudder completely over for a very long time before the boat finally reacted - maybe as much as a minute.

There were lightning also - at first three lightnings with accompanied thunder, the first one was 20s away from us, and the last one was 5s away from us. Lightning is pretty scary as we have a conducting mast pointing up with some 24 metres above the sea level. The next lightning was already so far away to the south that we could only see the blink, not hear any thunder. There was maybe some ten lightnings to the south, before the next maybe 15 lightnings was to the north of us, also too far away to hear any thunder.

My eldest son made me aware of some vertical column on the sky behind us. It was quite faint and it had started becoming dark, so hard to see, and the binocular didn't reveal anything - I think the only possible thing it could have been was a whirlwind.

A bit before arrival to the Gothenburg area, both me and my wife had fallen asleep. Luckily we had the radar warning on, some nautic miles in advance it was waking us up as we were heading directly towards the island of Nidingen. I find it pretty scary though, because the radar has a tendency to stop working every now and then. We also had depth alarm set to 8 meters, but in rocky terrain it may give us only some seconds notice. We need to be more clever to use both timers and waypoint alarm when there is a significant probability of falling asleep. I decided to roll in the genoa, start the engine and head on the port side of Nidingen.

As we got into sheltered water, I started reducing the sail area even more to reduce the speed. Keeping up the speed would mean we'd arrive in the early morning, and I didn't want that ... we still had lots of food on board that should be eaten and we were both quite exhausted, my wife still sleeping. I considered anchoring up, but there aren't many places suitable for anchoring in this area, and we still have some troubles with the anchoring equipment (I really need to get those things fixed, for me it's really important to be able to anchor up easily anytime and anywhere). I also wanted to pull in the dhingy and check if it was lots of water there. I tried to do a heave-to, I've actually never attempted that before, but something didn't really work out as it should, the boat was eventually turning around. I should try to do this again another time and try to understand what I'm doing wrong. Perhaps the main sail was rolled too much in and the genoa too little.

The plan was to go to Saltholmen, stay there for the shortest possible time while my family got out, then go to drop anchor. It was totally as predicted, this "shortest possible time" lasted for quite a while, perhaps a couple of hours ... my wife making food, feeding the family, packing luggage, taking some bikes to Oslo, etc. Eventually I got anchored up and we went back to Oslo; I'll write a short blog on our Gothenburg visit a bit later.

Soon our ship Solveig will be back in Oslo. This has been the longest summer vacation she's been to during the years we were owning her.

Selected photos available in original quality on IPFS QmPUS5NQ5tZiEahNzHCZjh8mS4DVn8JfBfMkUsbUVQxP9Z. All photos taken available in original quality on IPFS QmPUS5NQ5tZiEahNzHCZjh8mS4DVn8JfBfMkUsbUVQxP9Z. The CC BY-SA 4.0 license applies on both photos and article