Our dream is coming true

Johanna
N 60° 9.253', E 24° 53.464'

While we have been trying to sell our boat all the sailing friends have been asking the same questions. What next? A new racer or what? We have been kind of mysterious and mumbled something about a bit bigger cruiser and about the need to sail further than the Baltic sea.

Now it's about the time to come clean and tell everyone what our plan has been all along. To buy my parent?s boat.

Last month on my birthday's eve my dad called us and made a dream come true offer. If we have not sold our boat when the sailing season starts, he'll take it in exchange and continue to sell it.

Our new boat to be is nothing new and fancy, but good and well tested. My parents have already circumnavigated her twice. So here comes the next generation on board "S/Y Iiris".

We are still doing our best to sell our current boat "Valpuri", but now we can actually start making plans and prepare us for our new life.

Once more, we survived

Johanna

N 60° 9.253', E 24° 53.464'

I'm not talking about the apocalypse. I'm talking about the darkness. Yesterday was the shortest day of the year. In Helsinki time between sunrise and sunset was a total of 5 hours and 49 minutes.

Today I actually saw the sun for the first time in a couple of weeks, there really was a large patch of blue sky visible. That was something after all that snowing.

But I don't feel like winner yet. There's still a long and cold winter ahead of us. Sure there's going to be more light, but according to the statistics January and February are the coldest months...

Finnish winter before the sea is covered by ice.

Why Sail Far Away ?

Johanna 
N 60° 9.253', E 24° 53.464'

I was born into this cold country (somewhere way up north) called Finland.

As a kid my life seemed to be quite ok. My family spent all the summers sailing and then during the winters we went skiing and ice-skating and did whatever people do in the winter.

Then something happened. I spent a few months in the tropics. Nothing was the same after that. That one winter when I didn't see any snow changed my life forever. I knew what I wanted; no more snow, no more freezing my ass off.

Well, all this happened more than a decade ago and I'm still stuck here. Even at the moment when I'm writing this there's a snowstorm banging the windows.

But something has radically changed. About a year ago we (my husband and I) made a decision. We'll sail away. We'll sell our 31 footer, buy a bit bigger and more stable yacht, find a tenant for our apartment and then sail away for good.

Our goal was to leave Finland behind us in the summer of 2013, but the way things are going at the moment it looks like we'll take off a year later. We still haven't found a buyer for our 31 footer. so we can't take the next step which is to get the new yacht (not totally new, but new for us).

So at the beginning this blog is probably full of stories where I hate my life and also about the things we want and need to do before we take off.

And when the day comes to actually sail away I'll continue to tell you all about our cruising life. Well, at least the highlights anyway :)