2018 Cruising Plans

8 December 2017/Update 14 March 2018

Today we left our Winter berth in Amsterdam to head Northeast for a boatyard on the Lauwersmeer for some more project work.  A lift out and bottom scrub will wait until the weather is warmer, and most boats are in the water, freeing up yard space – this may be somewhere in Scandinavia.  New antifouling will be applied and a maintenance check carried out on all underwater areas.

We plan to head North through some more Dutch canals to reach the Kiel canal that will take us out onto the Baltic Sea.  We intend to cruise East along the Southern shore: Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.  We’ll cross the Gulf of Finland to Helsinki, where we’ll organise a tourist trip to St Petersburg (without L’Escale), before returning West along the Northern coast: the Finnish Archipelago, the Aland Islands, Sweden around Stockholm and Denmark’s islands around Copenhagen.  Time and weather permitting, we hope to sail the Kattegat and Skaggerak up to Oslo in Norway.

At the end of the season, we’ll come back into the Dutch canal system towards the coast of Belgium, explore the Northeast coast of France and gradually make our way along the French coast and down to Spain and Portugal, eventually reaching Gibraltar to enter the Mediterranean, maybe for the following Spring 2019.

Enjoy the ride!