Bornholm & mysterious stuff in the water

The winds are super light, pretty much non-existent. I'm going to go out into the... go out and see if we can find some wind out on the water, though. Maybe there's some more a little further away from land. Waring line's away. Out this way to the... These tugs are pushing the... are pushing this container ship against the wharf, and I can feel the prop wash all the way over here. It's making it really squirrely to steer this thing. I got another ship coming in here. Well, look at that! I found the wind, and we're doing three and a half knots. You can see our little bubbles moving through the water. Only took about five minutes to sail out here, and I can see little ripples all over the place, so if we can just kind of catch these little wind pockets, we can sail sailing out of here. It is, however, super hot out, so I'm gonna open up some port lights and turn on these fans. You gotta have fans on your boat, and I think the eight port lights is a little excessive. I would say having at least one on each side is so nice, and then, of course, the ones in the middle, too. Some rice, some sausages, and dumplings for lunch. I've been using the autopilot a lot more here in the Baltic just because the winds are much more variable. Also, I'm just too lazy to clean off the wind vane. I think I need to hose it off and oil it, maybe, or something. In Germany, maybe I'm gonna try to get new bearings for it, I think. Oh, shoot! I might have to wait till next year. So, right now, we are going downwind on a broad reach, and I did something a little differently than normal. This came from a YouTube comment recommendation. Yeah, I've noticed, like, on broad reaches, sometimes it's hard to get, like, the bow sails catching all the wind, right? Because the main, if I let that out too much, it blocks the wind of the sail, and then if it's in too much, the boat gets squirrely. I let out the main sheet a bunch, but I'm traveled up, and then I tightened up the, what's it called, the topping lift, so it kind of made the sail in a big hoop. So, the top of the sail is, you know, well outboard, but it's still, the boom isn't too far out, and it's not blocking the wind from the jib. And, man, we're going, we got an extra knot out of that, and there's hardly any wind. I'm gonna have to experiment with this more. So, we are seven hours in, and, of course, the wind has moved a little bit more behind us, and now we're wing on wing, but I think it's light enough. I want to fly the spinnaker now, uh, so I'm gonna time myself and see how quick I can get it up. I'm curious how long it actually takes. Well, that was a pretty big failure. It's just wrapped, the top half is wrapped around the jib. Uh, I'm not sure how to get that out. Maybe I'll sort of throw it with the halyard a bit. Okay, a little fiddling up front, and we got it open. Not too bad. I think that gave us at least half a knot, maybe a knot of boat speed, and should be able to run like this until it gets dark. I just checked the time at 18 minutes, which, uh, I think is pretty bad, but that has to include, uh, going out and preventing the, putting a preventer on the jib and fiddling around with the, I mean, it took me a long time to get it untangled, but that means there's plenty of room to improve. I'll just keep timing myself, see how much better I can do. I only forgot one, I forgot one, I forgot to run one line, the guy line over here, but other than that, I did pretty good. I should have gotten it up faster, too. It got wrapped really good around the jib. I need to work on speeding that head up. Set the hammock up for sunset. Maybe I'll sleep out here tonight. Day number two of our passage. I woke up and there's pretty good wind today. Better put this out here so you can have the wind. A little bit, pretty good wind, uh, so I think I can switch from the, uh, electric autopilot to the wind vane. Wind vane is connected. A while ago, I moved my, these blocks before they were, like, up, or up here, and now they're down here, and that kind of helps pull the tiller down. There's these interesting bands of, like, yellow flakes. Long ways. I can see it really good looking that way. These have been going on for miles, five miles, maybe longer. It's the end of day number two. Two or three? Yeah, number two. The sun just went down. Winds are picking up, so are the waves, too. Got real rolly for a minute. Looks like they're gonna pick up overnight, and, uh, it looks like, I think we can maybe find some shelter behind Bornholm Island. Maybe stop there, maybe just wait for the winds to switch, and then keep going. It seems like, well, as the winds pick up, the waves, it happens really quick. There's too many quick changes in the weather out here. Winds are already up to 25 knots. I'm seeing lightning on both sides of us. I made our jib. I think we have about half of the jib out right now, maybe a little less. Starting to get pretty uncomfortable on board, and it's not supposed to get the worst until 2 a.m. It's only 11, 10 or 11 right now, so we'll have to deal with this for a while, and then it should lighten up tomorrow before picking up again tomorrow night. It's raining super hard out there now. Lots of lightning. Well, day number three. The wind has died. The sails are doing their horrible flapping, and there's still some leftover waves. Of course, you can't really see them on the camera. I think I'm going to take down the mainsail now because we're actually moving backwards somehow. Well, it's 3 p.m. now. Still no wind. Just been bobbing around out here all day. The swell is maybe getting a little smaller, but it's still making it kind of rolly and uncomfortable. I hope the wind comes. The sun just finally came out, though, so maybe I'll go for a swim, and then maybe the sun will bring some wind. Sounds good. Wind finally came back out. We got about 15 knots. Unfortunately, the seas are a little bit more lumpy than they started up the trip. It was so nice, but it was just like dead calm, and we were just flying with just a little breaths of wind, but now we're kind of hobby-horsing a bit, and it's slowing us down. Just reaped the mainsail and a little bit of jib. That got us an extra two knots. It's crazy how sometimes making the sails smaller makes you go faster. I guess it's just the boat's not heeling over as far, and fighting the weather is hard. I don't know. It's so much smoother now. We're right next to the shipping traffic separation zone scheme place, whatever, and it's just like a highway of container ships as far as you can see, so I don't think I'll be getting much sleep tonight. I have to look up every five or ten minutes just to make sure we haven't wandered into their... the way of one of them, or one of them hasn't wandered outside of their little highway on the water. It's day number four now. We've done 260 miles so far. We're coming up on Bornholm Island. I might stop there, get some internet and new weather updates, and maybe a little bit more food. Well, I'm doing okay on food, I guess. I might not. I might just keep going. We'll see. My dumpling's kind of merged into one big mess, but that's okay. We'll make it work. Looks pretty good. I decided to go to Bornholm Island. There's a harbor here, and if I can make it within three hours, I can get here before the grocery store closes and get myself some fresh food. We'll probably maybe leave tonight, or maybe tomorrow. Here's Bornholm Island. It's a castle. It ruins quite a few boats in the harbor. We're at this end spot. As long as the swell doesn't come in too bad through here, we should be fine. I'm really glad I got to stop here in Bornholm. It's such a nice little island. It's Danish, even though it's right across from Sweden. I had to skip it the first couple times because the wind. It didn't make sense to sail here, but it made perfect sense. I'm on my way back to the UK. There's really nice trails, and even there's a castle up here on this hill. It's a proper castle. It's got a nice little bridge. Thanks for watching, and also a big thanks to everybody who has contributed to help me make these videos possible. If you are interested in making a contribution, if you're getting some of the videos, there's links in the description below. Otherwise, thanks for watching again, and I'll see you guys next time.