Sailing in Sweden
Monday August 6, 2007
Heya people – Greetings from my pretty spontaneuos summer vacation to Sweden together with Alex.
On Wednesday we took a flight from Frankfurt over Gothenburg to Stockholm. Unfortunately we arrived at Arlanda Airport around 2000, so we missed the last direct train to our destination (Hudiksvall) by something like 15 minutes…
So we asked around at the train station for some alternate transportation… We had quite a lotta luck finding a very nice Swedish Railway employee that directly used her PC to get us some tickets for some Night-Bus (ybuss.se).
The alternative would have been to stay at the airport overnight and take the first train in the morning – So we preferred the 4 hour nightbus ride, which was also a lot cheaper (22€ instead of 60€ pp)…
Finally we arrived at Hudiksval Gas Station around 01:30 in the night and we were lucky again: Some pretty nice Swedish couple gave us a ride to the harbor (like 6km) and so we reached the boat after altogether like 12 hours of transit…
The next morning we got to the city to get some basic indegredients to prepare an opulent breakfast… Blue sky, 15-20knots of wind and glazing sunlight.
We spent the entire afternoon to rig up the boat, replenish water and buy enough food for the next days on sea.
Of course we kept a pretty low standard of living and got some fresh salmon for dinner 
The boat itself is an 11.5m sailing boat with the jargon classification “coffee pot”, which means: full featured sea-bound camping with all the stuff you need to have a pretty comfortable time at the sea 
Right now we are sailing at around 3 knots relative speed having around 10 knots of south-bound wind … But we were spoiled by stopping in the middle of nowhere seeing a wonderful golden sunset. Nobody around here, very very quiet.
After the first days, we had a lot of luck concerning the wind – now at around 15knots we did some “race days” going more than 50 miles yesterday! Today the wind got a little slower, so this day will be less “stressy”. All in all: Very quiet, relaxing and the perfect chill-out for the second half of my diploma thesis