In 2018, we take off!

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Happy New Year everyone!

Over a month ago, Ryan and I sent New Years cards to our friends and family. In our New Year's card, we had happily announced that they could find a little recap of 2017 and a description of our 2018 sailing plan on our website.

The problem at that time was:

• I had not written a recap of 2017.
• Our website was half crashed.
• We had no actual plan for 2018.

(PS: If you haven't received a New Year's card from us.... that's normal. All the cards we were going to send in Europe are still sitting on the kitchen table)

It is now mid-February, and the season for New Years greetings is over. But I am happy to announce both that the website is repaired, and that we now do have a plan!

Ladies and gentleman, I give you: our 2018 goal!!! Sailing from Stockholm to Gibraltar between May and October of 2018.

(Possibly go farther. But for now, it will do.)

That's right! We are setting sail back to Gibraltar.

Our 2400 nautical miles journey should take us right to the place where it all began! For the new readers around here, Gibraltar is where we learned how to sail.

Now, it doesn't mean that it's all we are going to do this season. We may choose to sail farther in the Mediterranean this year, or maybe head to the Canaries.

We could aim at sailing farther, and plan our season all the way through next winter. But we have learned to have more reasonnable ambitions :)

When we started considering sailing as a life plan for the coming years, we got VERY ambitious, VERY quickly.

But with 0 experience of boats, how could we have known? We imagined that right after taking our RYA Competent Crew and Day Skipper, we would immediately buy THE sailboat, and kick off the big sailing adventure around the World within a year, with a crossing of the Atlantic in the winter of 2017-2018.

That's right, according to our original plan, we would have been in the Caribean as we speak! Hahaha :)

Now, looking around on social media, blogs, and Youtube, it sure seems like going from 0 sailing experience to buying a boat and immediately go out on the ocean seems to work for some.

But let me tell you, that's not how it worked for us.

Put it this way: we bought our boat with our Day Skipper course in the pocket, and what happened next DID make us a lot more humble about sailing.

Oh yes, we did know that all sailors out there have their stories, and we sure spent the 2016 and 2017 gathering some of our own :)

We learned the hard way to take it easy and lowered the level of our ambitions. Approaching cruising step by step and carefully plan the times during which we would go out of our comfort zone made cruising a lot more enjoyable.

Our 12 months sailing plan turned into a two and a half years plan, and we are all better for it! To the question "When will we cross the Atlantic?" we now answer "When we feel good about it"

So we made a loose plan to sail to Gibraltar, with plenty of room for changes and peace of mind on the way, cause that's how we like it :)

Step 1: Stockholm to the UK

Our only "time constraint" lies in a professional engagement that Ryan has in London starting June 25th.

I only made this passage plan from Stockholm to Dover, so that we would set a departure date to plan around.

This passage plan gives us plenty of room extra breaks along the way, and should we not make it in time, Ryan can still hop on a train from France or Holland.

So there we are everyone: we are leaving on May 15th!!! (This is, of course, a preliminary plan... In the 3 weeks that this plan has existed, we've already had at least one good reason to question it!)

Step 2: Southern UK to Southern Brittany

When Ryan is done with his work London, we will plan our passage from the UK to Southern Finistere in Brittany, where we plan to arrive beginning of July.

How exactly we will make it is unclear. We might sail to Guernsey, or cross from Plymouth to Roscoff: we don't know yet. I would like to explore the Southern coast of the UK all the way to Plymouth, but I have nothing against a visit to Guernsey either.

Allt that matters is that we moor Polar Seal in Sainte Marine, where I have so many childhood memories.

Step 3: Southern Brittany to Gibraltar

We will spend at least two weeks in Brittany, where the family gathering might a big one :)

We will then cross Biscay and head straight to Northern Spain, for what will be our first ocean passage ever. From there, our plan is to slowly make our way down to Gibraltar, and enjoy cruising around Portugal!

Last week marked two years since we returned from our two weeks sailing class in Gibraltar, and somewhere it feels like a big accomplishment to get back there with our own boat.

Are you somewhere on the way and want to meet? Do you think there is something we should not miss while cruising down to the Med? Leave us a comment!

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