Midnight sailing - 2 June 2017

Swedish national day on Tuesday 6. Therefore, a 4 day weekend ahead, with the objective to get Belisama around Kalmar to anticipate on the July trip around the southern coast of the Baltic. Departure 20:30 from Nynäshamn with south winds, due to turn southwest during the night.

This picture was taken at midnight, looking north, where the sun is at this time, but not quite far below the horizon. No need for navigation lights!

There is a good 8 to 10 m/s wind, without big waves. With one reef to be on the safe side during the night, Belisama tacks at around 6 knots.

Still around midnight, but looking south east. On the left, we can see the continuation of the previous picture. Looking towards the right side of the picture, the blue area along the horizon under a pinkish zone and that increases as you look right is the shadow of the earth. Remember the Venus belt in a previous post last summer? The Venus belt is usually seen just after the sunset, when the sun goes beyond the horizon and is quite marked. I realise that under these latitude, around the summer solstice, you can see the Venus blet during the whole night.

At night passes, the Venus belt reduces progressively, until if fades out just before the sun rise. This is the best way to indicate when the first ray of the new sun will show. No green ray this time! It is 3:40 in the morning, and still a long way to go.

I tried the Weather4D version 2 for the routing. 100 nautical miles to go, facing wind. A challenge that you want to optimise. The small coloured boats are indicating the different routes tested, according to expected time of departure as well as different point of departures, and assuming a bit of motor use at the start to go around Landsort. I chose to follow the small bue boats more west routes in an attempt to get less waves on the way. As you see on the actual route, I was not able to make as good of a tack as the routing software, and it took us 23 hours to reach Öland versus 18 announced. I might have to look back at the polar I designed for Belisama.

We pass Norra Udde light house around 19:00 and enter Grankullaviken where we find a good protected mooring along side the old ferry pier. Twenty-three hours after having left Nynähamn. 

And now, the video...