The plan was to got to the north end of Gotland to have a good jumping-off point for Ventspils. Things turnd out differently.
I very carefully checked the weather before embarking on that long leg to Gotland. I can now report that it was correct for the start and end of the trip from Öxelosund to Gotland. In between I got surprised. There were pretty impressive waves (always hard to estimate wave height, but I guess they were 2 meters+) and they came pretty fast, like the they do in the Baltic sea.
Akka was magnificient and, although we had the wind at about 60 degrees on port, she managed all right. We zipped along and were never under 6 kts. Well, until the wind piped up. For the first few hours we had a nice 15 kts, but within an hour it got up to 25 kts. By this time we were all the way reefed down and we managed still OK. Although we were heading into the wind and waves, we still made 6 kts and I decided to keep course. At midday we got some fog, which was generally worrying. Around the same time I got some voltage messages from my AIS-transponder and the depth/speed/wind display started to play up every now and again. I have no idea what the problem was/is, but I decided to make life easier for Akka and changed course to Visby, which was about 30 degrees futher off the wind and things become easier immediately. The fog lingered and while I could see the sun struggling, it did not make it through for another few hours. The rain did come through though. It was not a lot, but enough to get things more miserable. Only at about 3pm did things calm down and the sun came through. From the onwards it was plain-sailing as they say and we made it into Visby just uner 15 hours for 80 nm.
Very tired (after approx 20 reefs) and somewhat amazed about Akka how she powered through everything. So cool! We were (seriously) overtaken by all boats on similar courses though, but do I care 🙂
