Onderwerp: Erikdejongs ijselijke avonturen

Dear Friends, Family and colleagues,

This is our first update of this summer while on our way to the north. I went through my address book in the computer and selected all of your email addresses, because I thought you might appreciate some news from us once in a while. If I was wrong about your interest, please let me know, and I will remove your address from the list without any hard feelings.

As most of you know, we have encountered some unpleasant delays at the beginning of our trip. We were only a few miles out of Halifax harbor when the autopilot was giving errors of such nature that automatic steering was not possible anymore. An autopilot is not the most critical system on a boat, and a boat can perfectly well sail without one. But the perspective of eternal fog, cold, storms and Icebergs further down the road did not seem so pleasant by having a person standing behind the wheel 24/7. So we decided to go back. I can make this a very long story about what all happened, but the short version is that a part of the steering gear (gearbox and link arms) had to be replaced, as well as the drive motor, and in order to prevent similar problems in the future, the autopilot itself had to be replaced for a new one. The autopilot was not a big problem, a new one was installed within the next two days since there was one in stock at a local store. The broken parts of the steering gear as well as the electrical drive had to come straight from the factory in Denmark, and that was a struggle. Anything that could go wrong with that shipment, actually did go wrong, and it was not until 10 days after our scheduled departure, that we finally left Halifax.

I generally don't like going on a long trip with new and untested gear that falls in the category of "mission critical", and a rudder is one of those. But now, 1700 miles further, the gear seems to work great and the autopilot is better than the old one ever was and consumes less energy as well. The trip itself is actually pretty uneventful, and that is why it took me so long to actually come up with something to write to all of you. I could bore you with what we eat, when we sleep and what other kind of things are happening. But in fact, our world has been pretty small the last few weeks. We have seen more fog than anything else, and a day on which the horizon is visible is a good day. We've seen iceberg, we've seen a whale pretty close to the boat, dolphins have been seen, lots of sea birds and the food is good, no major storms, a bit more calms than usual, resulting in more engine hours than I would like. But that is all part of the sailing life, and one of the things that makes it so nice, because it is unpredictable.

While passing Newfoundland, we did decide to make a short stop in St John's, this for some shopping, some internet business that had to be taken care of, and to get some more diesel oil in the tank. We have left St John's 6 days ago, and we are approaching the coast of Greenland now. The weather is really calm when I write this, and we just had our meal while sitting at the dining table, for the people among you that do not sail themselves, this only happens a few times during one's sailing life and is considered pretty unique! The engine is running, and we anticipate to make landfall in Nuuk in a couple of days.

All in all, we are happy out here at sea, life is good and we are looking very much forward to set foot ashore in one of the most beautiful countries in the world.
We will keep you posted about our progress and news by sending you these emails. But we will also update our facebook page (bagheera-sailing) as well as our website (www.bagheera-sailing.com) on a regular basis, and that will actually include pictures, something that I cannot send along with our satellite communication system.

All the best for now,
Bagheera, Erik and Crew.