Dear readers,

Sorry for not keeping you updated for so long but we have had a few very busy weeks!

Since our last post, which we wrote from Dover, we once again crossed the English channel and arrived in Calais, before continuing to Dunkirk on the next day. Navigating in the English channel is always a bit of a challenge due to very strong currents and the huge number of cargos. But everything went really well and except for some pretty high waves near the coast that rendered the sails a bit more challenging, we had a really good time!

We spent a few days in Dunkirk waiting for better wind directions and seized the opportunity to work on the boat and prepare it for its new owner. We then had one last long sail to Amsterdam. The Dutch navigation area is rather intresting as it has lots of obstacles such as windfarms, and passing Rotterdam (Europe’s largest harbour) at night was also quite a challenge! The last few hours before reaching Amsterdam were very different from the rest of our trip as we motored along Dutch canals all the way into the city center and even passed through some waterlocks with our boat!

After visiting Amsterdam and enjoying the canals from a different angle, we set off for our last sail on Misty Sea… This again was a rather different sail as it first lead through a canal to another waterlock, and then into a big lake (the Markermeer) which will be Misty Sea’s home for the next few years!

Having arrived at our destination, we spent two more days cleaning the boat as well as possible given the water restrictions and packing all our things. After living on the boat for 6 months, there was quite a lot to pack!

And after 6 months on our Misty Sea, we also finally managed to take the first photo of the two of us with the boat, so here we go:

It was quite sad and strange leaving our boat behind but we know that it will be in good hands! We are now slowly digesting how amazing the entire trip was and are super happy that we took the time to immerge into a totally different lifestyle for half a year! It is for sure an adventure that we will remember and that has thought us so much, not only about sailing but also about lots of other life skills (such as mechanics, plumbing, electrics circuits, wheather systems, sealife, managing ressources, and travelling in general). But we are now also looking forward for some on-land adventures!

Thanks to everyone who followed our adventure! 🙂

Dear readers,

We have now reached UK mainland and are enjoying our last weeks of boat life!

We crossed the English channel amidst multiple cargo ships and arrived in the Solent in southern England. The Solent is probably the UK’s most reputed area for sailing as it is formed around a channel located between the isle of Wight and UK mainland and has multiple harbours and anchorage possibilities. The Solent also has very well preserved and beautiful landscapes with great pedestrian paths!

Navigating in the Solent was also great: there are no waves, there are plenty other sailboats to race with and there’s plenty of stuff to see on the coast on both sides 🙂 We’ve noticed that Misty Sea is once again one of the smallest boats around as sailing is quite a posh sport in the UK!

After leaving the Solent, we sailed to Dover. The fist things one sees when arriving to Dover from the sea are the huge white cliffs on either side of the city. As climbers, we obviously got pretty excited to climb those… But a short research showed that those cliffs are actually made of chalk and only climbable with crampons, ice axes and a lot of courage… We decided to stick to nice walks along those cliffs.

We’ve now spent a few days in Dover, which is in itself not such a nice city. But we seized the opportunity to start preparing the boat for the new owner and to visit Louis’ sister in London 🙂

Tomorrow, we’ll cross the English channel again to arrive in Calais or Dunkirk. We’ll then travel northwards to the Netherlands in the coming week for the very last part of our trip!

Hello everyone!

Our last friend having left a few days ago, our visitor marathon is now over. We’ve been incredibly happy to share some of our trip with family and friends but we’re now also happy to relax a bit and spend some time just the two of us!

Although we’re generally not very good at just relaxing, adopting a quieter lifestyle has been forced upon us these last days as it’s been raining quite regularly… We got to finally explore all the board games we’ve had onboard for the last months!

Navigation-wise, Brittany and the English Channel (in which we are now) have been very fun as we get to sail through pretty strong currents. The direction of such currents reverses every 6 hours. When timed properly and sailing with the currents, we can up to double our sailing speed! But when the currents are against us, we slow down to frustratingly slow speeds and can only wait for the currents to reverse again…

Since our last post, we visited Brest (which was rather a disappointment compared to other places in Brittany as there’s not much to see) and the very picturesque town of Roscoff, known for its famous onion.

As part of the random surprises we encounter along the way, a huge old ship replica berthed next to us in the harbour offering us a free tour. It’s actually an awesome business as it’s sailed by a few passionate sailors who finance it by lending it as film sets!

As you might have guessed from the described rainy weather, we’re now in the UK! Well, were actually on the channel island Guernsey right now and are planning to cross the English channel to UK-mainland tomorrow.

The end of our trip is approaching and our plans for the coming weeks are to explore the isle of Wight along the southern English coast, sail to Dover where we’ll meet Louis’ sister, and then head to the Netherlands where Misty Sea will meet its new owner!

Hello dear readers,

We’re officially out of France and into the independent territories of Brittany (Bretagne)! As it happens, it is also home to all of France’s tourists in August and as such, we could again witness the great circus of overly crowded harbours, the chaos on the over-used emergency channel and small villages being crushed by a 10 fold increase in their regular population. But somehow, this all happens in a joyful manner and didn’t alter the beauty of our time in Brittany so far!

After a small tour in Noirmoutier, we enjoyed perfect conditions to sail further north to Concarneau. The sail was pretty fast and only slowed down by a famous regatta that we had to avoid. And potentially by some onboard crepe cooking 🙂 …

This is, at heart, a time of remembering earlier times as we go through places we have known at different times in our youths. 

Our visitor’s Marathon still goes on as we’re now four on board with Sara’s mum and sister, sailing along the south coast of Brittany towards Brest. We’re currently in the western part of Brittany, which is home to absolutely stunning landscapes with wild rock formations. These allow for great coastal walk and climbing!

In Brest, we will meet an old friend of Sara and finally leave France for our dear neighbors across the English Channel, where we’ll meet with Louis sister… Quite a change from the first 3 months where it was just the two of us 🙂 

We’re also enjoying the ideal wind patterns of Brittany: stable, moderate winds that shift every 2-3 days. This allows us to move when the wind direction fits and enjoy the place when it doesn’t! It might be because of some form of Chauvinisme, but it does feel like Brittany is a heaven for sailors! 

Hello everyone! August is the month during which the French go on holidays, meaning that we are currently always surrounded by lots of other sail boats on the water and by lots of Parisian tourists on land. This has been very nice and lively though!

Being in France in August also means that our French friends and family can come and visit more easily and we’ve been very happy to spend some time with them! We met up with Louis’ parents for an afternoon, with Alex and Will who were also sailing around the Ile de Ré, and with Antoine and Marc, who came from Paris 🙂

Funnily, as we were having dinner on our boat in the harbour of the old town of la Rochelle, a familiar boat arrived: it was one of the boats that we knew from Spain and that had done the crossing of the Bay of Biscay with us but aiming at a different island. We got to catch up with the owners and share our respective stories of the crossing.

Sailing in France in August also means that it can get quite crowded in tiny harbours… We for example experienced this in the charming harbour of Saint Martin de Ré, where we had to dock onto other boat.. This means that only the first boats arriving at the harbour get a place along a pontoon while all following boats attach themselves on the first boats. You can imagine the mess when the first boat decides to leave at 7am while all others want to stay!

Overall, we spent a few days on the Ile de Ré and the Ile d’Yeu, where we tried out windsurfing, cycled around, enjoyed the nice vendéen architecture and the French food!

We are now in Noirmoutier, where Louis used to spend a lot of time every summer since his parents had a summer house there until not long ago. But as a good start, Louis just fell into the harbour water haha.

On Friday, we should get perfect winds to sail fastly to Concarneau, on the south-western part of the Bretagne, where we will meet up with Sara’s mum and sister. We’ll then continue sailing around the tip of the Bretagne and should reach Paimpol around the 12th of August and cross towards England shortly after. And of course, during all this journey around France and the UK, we’ll keep having plenty of visitors 🙂

Bonjour tout le monde ! Today, we are writing this blog article from the french coast, after having croissants for breakfast… that feels good 🙂

The last 5 months have been for us a time of constant discovery and adventure. Everywhere we went, every new step along the way was something new to us and thus never really felt at home. Although that’s exactly what we signed up for, it is stressful and exhausting over the long run. Reaching for the first time, after 5 months, a home country and moreover, a place we’ve seen and sailed before is truly satisfying, like a feeling of achievement.

To be fair, we really enjoyed the last few days overall. We stayed 4 days in the Gijón marina in Spain, which was the landing and departure point of all sailors crossing the bay of Biscay. We were all docked at the same pontoon and quickly got to know all of our neighbors. Every day, we would say goodbye to the one who left and greet the newcomers arriving after a long and tiring crossing, sharing stories and sailing tips. It was a truly amazing atmosphere!

One thing we got reminded of by interacting so much with other sailors is how misogynistic the sailing world really is. This is a very traditional sport, a male-dominated sport and this gets really felt in the discussions we had with other people and the role distributions on the various crews.

On Sunday, together with two of our neighbors, we set sails toward La Rochelle in France. We couldn’t hope for better conditions with 2 days of stable side winds which allowed us to cover 460km in under 48h! Apart from the pleasure of moving so efficiently, we also got the highlight of catching another Tuna 🙂 After months of unsuccessful fishing, we got the surprise of catching an even bigger fish than last time after only 5 minutes of fishing. Since we wouldn’t have any fridge until the next day (ours must be turned off while sailing), we had to prepare it and cook it while sailing, which turned our boat into a bloody crime scene.

Since we are now in France, at an anchorage near La Rochelle, we will have a lot of visitors over the coming weeks. This will be a logistic challenge, but a pleasant one for sure! In the next 3 days, we will already meet with 2 groups of friends and Louis’s parents, then we will host Sara’s mother and sister for a week, then childhood friends of Sara for a few days, all this while moving slowly toward England. The weather seems to have the classic wind pattern of when there is no important pressure system above Europe: no wind during the day, then North-West winds in the late afternoon caused by land area warming up faster than the sea and North-East winds during the night, caused by land area cooling down faster than the sea. In other words, we will have to travel at night exclusively during the next weeks 🙂

Hola! After a few weeks in Portugal, we are now back in Spain! The Portuguese coast was very beautiful but also very straight, meaning that it didn’t offer many sheltered anchoring possibilities and that we mostly went to harbors. Although harbors are nice every now and then and make visiting cities more convenient, we usually prefer the isolated atmosphere provided by anchorages.

We were therefore very happy to arrive in Galicia (northern Spain), which offers superb anchorages along a beautiful and very irregular coastline. We spent a week at different anchorage in Galicia and enjoyed spending more time with friends. First, our friends Simon and Franzi, who had left us in Porto, couldn’t get enough of boat life and came back to see us there, and then, Louis’ friend Paul joined us for a long weekend 😊

The week at anchorages was a mixture between beach and bathing fun on warmer days, and hiking on cooler days. One of the hikes actually included the end of a variant of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route in Fisterra!

You might be wondering how we’re coping with the ongoing heat wave…well, we have to say: come to northern Spain, temperatures don’t go higher than 23° this week! Despite that, we sadly saw some wildfires during one of our night sails…

These colder temperatures in Galicia and northern Spain came with quite a bit of fog and Misty Sea was happy to navigate in her name-giving environment (we were less happy about it though). But we have to admit that misty landscapes have something magical about them, especially on land!

Another great point is that the good winds are FINALLY back! On Monday and Tuesday, we had winds coming from behind (instead of the wind coming from up front that we’d had since Gibraltar). We seized the opportunity and had a nice 48h DOWNWIND sail to Gijón, which is a city in the center of the northern Spanish coast. We had almost forgotten what it is like to sail in good winds blowing in the right direction: it is a lot faster, less frustrating, and accompanied by waves pushing you in the right direction rather than breaking your entire speed since waves usually follow the wind’s direction.

We’re going to stay in Gijón for the next few days. We’ll rest from the journey, do some maintenance work on the boat, and hopefully do a bit of climbing and surfing.

Then, the plan is to sail across the Bay of Biscay either directly from Gijón or from a bit further west. This crossing should take us around 48h and bring us to the area of the Ile d’Oléron in France, where we hope to arrive by the end of July. We expect to stay in France for 2-3 weeks before heading to southern England. In France, we’ll meet Sara’s mum and sister, and potentially some last-minute visitors from Paris 🙂

Just like bad news, good news also don’t come alone, so we already have a good weather window to cross the Bay of Biscay starting on Sunday. Although it looks like we’re following the coastline, crossing the Bay of Biscay is known as a serious challenge and similar to a sea crossing: not only because of the peculiar wind and waves pattern that can occur but also because the lack of harbors along the french south coast forces sailors to do a trip of at least 250km without possible halts. In our case, this will probably be a 400km stretch in a single go! Wish us luck and we’ll see you on the other side 😉

Hello everyone! In our last post, we explained how we’re currently doing a lot of upwind sailing and hence moving forward a bit slower than usual. Not much has changed in that respect since we still majorly get winds from the north. As an unpleasant addition, we had multiple days with no winds at all, which obviously isn’t great for sailing either…

We could also test a new limit of Misty Sea: by being 5 people living on board for a week. Turns out it works like a charm! We were hoping to meet our friends from Munich (Philipp, Simon and Franzi) in Aveiro but didn’t make it in time due to the unfavorable wind conditions. Luckily, they could take a bus and meet us in Nazaré instead 🙂

Nazaré is home to the highest waves in the world and is a surfing paradise for big wave surfing (currently, the highest wave ever surfed was surfed in Nazaré and was 26m tall!). Aren’t these great prerequisites for trying out surfing for the very first time?

Nice waves for surfing aren’t nice for sailing though. Unfortunately, our friends had to experience that the hard way on our first day of sailing together and were quite seasick…

Luckily, our three friends were brave enough to give it another try and on our second day of joint sailing, everyone felt well and was able to enjoy the entire day of sailing, including a nice sunrise, lots of dolphins, good food, a nice sunset, some outstanding ukelele performances, and some untangling of fishing threads!

This nice navigation made us arrive in Porto, where we spent two more days with our friends, visiting, doing some beach bouldering, drinking Port wine and trying to escape the heat by going for lots swims!

After saying goodbye to our friends this morning, we left for northern Spain. We’ll probably spend a few days in the bay near Vigo, where another friend will meet us on Thursday.

The Azores high is a high pressure point always present in the north-Atlantic, and is the main driver of the winds in this part of the globe. Air currents spiral out of it in a clockwise motion which sends all those Northern winds along the Portuguese coats… The ones we have been struggling with for the last 3 weeks.

The Azores high actually moves randomly between the Azores and northern Ireland and its position has a great influence on the wind directions along the european coast. After being stuck for several weeks far up north, it is finally coming back to the Azores! It may sounds insignificant but it may signal the end of the slow and exhausting up-wind trip along the portuguese coast, and the return of cruising through south and west winds toward France!

We have one more up-wind trip toward Vigo, but then, we already plan on sailing (hopefully) efficiently toward La Coruna before the 18th of July. From there, we will finally start planning the crossing of the bay of Biscay toward France!

We also have a big update regarding the future of Misty Sea!!! We already mentioned a while ago that we started posting adds for a new owner for Misty Sea. It was great to see how many people where motivated to be the next “chosen one” and thus we could sign a contract much earlier than expected. Don’t worry, Misty is going to be in good hands! This also mean that we know our final destination: our journey is going to End in early September in the Netherlands!

See you soon for some more updates !

Good Morning everybody and welcome to a new travel update 🙂 These last few weeks have seen quite a few important landmarks of the journey and also exploring new aspects of it, so let’s tell you all about it!

We got reminded during this trip that not everybody knows that sailboats can actually sail against the wind. Although it has become self-evident to us, when thinking back on it, we can’t deny that it’s truly a great mechanical feat of the design of sailboats. But this ability does not come without drawbacks: when going upwind, you will have to travel longer distances than the direct route, the sails are less efficient at pushing you forward and you will most of the time be moving against the waves. All in all, it’s considered that traveling a given distance takes 2 to 3 times longer upwind than downwind. This little information has been very relevant to us these last few days as we have had to travel hundreds of kilometers upwind…

Although we had planned to stay in Faro a couple more days to rest from our latest trip, we had to leave earlier as the weather forecasts worsened and made our initial plans impractical. As it happened way too often during this journey, we went, in the course of 30 minutes, from thinking that we had 2 days of resting ahead of us to deciding to leave in the next 2 hours. Because of this, we also missed an opportunity to meet with a colleague of Louis who was on vacation just a few kilometers away 😦 Nevertheless, we reached during this sailing trip an important landmark: the point furthest away from our starting place, by going around the southwest tip of Portugal! As usual, we enjoyed a stop near a small town offering beautiful sightseeing and climbing spots, before heading to Lisbon in a crazily intense 10 hours sail (who knew the entrance of such a city could have such a rough local weather O_O)…

During this time, we also started a sad, but nevertheless interesting, part of the trip: selling Misty Sea. You might have seen the new blog section we dedicated to it 😉 What lifted our spirit though was the unexpected popularity Misty Sea received! We always knew she would be a Casanova :p

Our next appointment is now with 3 friends from Munich, which we hope to meet in Aveiro next Monday. For this, we will have to move 250km further North and thus plan another 48h of intense Sailing upwind… We cross our fingers for the winds to be favorable!

After our last post, we spent a few more days in Gibraltar. A big highlight was that a local climber took us to a local climbing crag, which was located at the end of a labyrinth of tunnels built 250 years ago. We would never have found that area without his help and it was a very unique experience!

Spending some time in Gibraltar also put into perspective the size of our tuna caught a few weeks ago… While we were quite proud of our 3kg tuna, Gibraltarians clearly have better fishing techniques and go for the 300kg version. We were very impressed by the size of those beasts but also glad we didn’t fish one of those!

Gibraltar was superb but at some point we had to go. As you’ve probably guessed, we have now reached the Atlantic! Well, strictly speaking, the Mediterranean sea ejected us into the Atlantic with stormy winds and we cruised through the Strait of Gibraltar at 7-8 knots (that’s pretty fast). There was no possibility of turning around but we were very happy for those stronger winds and sporty sailing conditions as the winds had been rather weak over the past 6 weeks 🙂

As we reached the Atlantic, we entered the Orca’s territory. Not wanting to try any of the fishing techniques taught by the Gibraltarians on the Orcas, we decided to play safe and navigate close to shore. We successfully passed the most risky portion, which was near the Strait of Gibraltar, without orca sighting – phew! Needless to say, Sara jumped 3m high every time we saw a dolphin or anything looking remotely like an orca, such as a crashing wave for example…

We could finally get our first taste of the main differences of sailing fashion between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic: We had, for example, to stop 5 hours after leaving Gibraltar as the currents were turning against us, due to the bi-daily cycle of tides. This means however that by having a good timing, we can gain an extra +30% of speed 🚀. The approach to the winds is also very different: previously, what mattered was mostly whether or not there is wind. Since the winds in the Atlantic are so much more stable, it’s rather about the direction of the winds, as they can stay consistently against us for days and weeks in a row. It’s nevertheless awesome to encounter so much change and having to rediscover how to go about moving forward !

So back to what happened :p After two night sails and a few short stops along the way, we have reached Faro in Portugal this morning. We haven’t left the boat yet as it’s stormy and too risky to leave the boat alone at the anchorage but we’ll explore Faro in the next couple of days 🙂

So what do we do on stormy days on the boat? We write blog posts, upload a video for the sale of the boat, get into arguments with our telephone providers, and just hang around…

In Portugal, it is definitely going to be challenging to make progress: the famous trade winds of central Atlantic create a constant blow North to South… too bad we’re going on the opposite direction! Our next big stop should be in Lisbon, where we’ll take any opportunity to go northwards. We’re still optimistic about reaching it before the 3rd of July to meet some friends there. If we stop in Sagres along the way, we might also do a bit of climbing or surfing there… if anyone has any surfing recommendations for Sagres, we’d be interested (we’re absolute beginners). Thanks 🙂