Sailing

My preferred type of sailing is day sailing in good weather. If you sail a boat that is sufficiently small, you feel each wave and each gust of wind. Thus, you can be at one with the sea and the wind. My boat is only 5.65 m long and weighs only half a ton; but she is well equipped for day sailing.

Her homeport is in the West Swedish Archipelago, a large group of thousands of islands north of Göteborg, Sweden. It is in the eastern part of Skagerrak, a big bay off the North Sea. The archipelago has clean salt water and negligible tides. It is stunningly beautiful and irresistible when the sun is out and the wind is good.

My boat has her own car trailer and her lead keel can be raised, so that it is easy to launch and retrieve her on any ramp. In the spring of 2004, a friend and I trailered her to the French Riviera and sailed her from port to port eastward along the French and Italian Rivieras. We sailed only in daylight and only when the weather was good. We stayed in hotels ashore and enjoyed being part of the local French and Italian cultures in the port cities. A couple of my articles in English about that trip appeared in the Swedish nautical magazine, Odyssé, and won its First Prize as its best articles of the year.

Similarly, a friend and I trailered the boat to Lofoten, a Norwegian archipelago far north of the Arctic Circle and sailed it there from port to port in 2006. The next trip will be along Costa del Sol, Spain’s south coast in Spring, 2007. Can you suggest other good landfalls?