After a long wait, we finally got the right weather window to go ahead and bring Rebel from Holland to Germany. I travelled the long route back to Amsterdam, then caught another train to Den Helder, where the boat was.
I arrived late — the train was delayed, as usual — but that didn’t matter. We ended up leaving around 0600 for Bremen, Germany. The weather looked fairly calm, and we were ready. I wasn’t even nervous, to be honest. It just felt so normal to do such a “small” passage. We had about 160 nautical miles to cover in four days, which was very doable — especially since I had work coming up and the forecast showed the weather would soon turn nasty.
As soon as we left the harbour, we had around 12–15 knots, which was perfect to get all the sails up — no reefs at all. I started getting to know how the wind vane worked and enjoyed the dry weather, even as dark clouds began to roll in. It wasn’t going to be long before they hit us. Around noon, we had a nice lunch — and then the rain came. I spent a lot of time hand-steering, just feeling how the boat handled the wind at different angles. There were very few ships on the way, until we reached a shipping lane that exposed us to a few smaller cargo vessels.
Around 1700, we decided it was a good time to put a reef in the main, as the wind was steadily increasing and we were soon to enter the North Sea. That turned out to be a wise decision, because the wind kept rising through the night to around 30 knots. Even then, we were still slightly overpowered, which gave me a good sense of the boat’s strengths and weaknesses. I could definitely tell the bow loves to dive when surfing down waves, but that also means she sails beautifully upwind at a 30-degree angle.
We made good headway, and around 10:00 we approached the entrance to Bremerhaven with the current in our favour — at one point we reached 10 knots of boat speed, which gave us a real boost the rest of the way. Bremerhaven is very flat, but there's a small island nearby that gave us some strong gusts — we were nicely heeled over, and it made for a very enjoyable sail, even though I was absolutely shattered after the long night shift.
The last few hours down the Weser were beautiful, and I slowly started to take in the fact that this was now my boat. We enjoyed a nice cold beer and slowly headed to bed, as tomorrow was an early start — the previous owners were heading back to Holland.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that little update.
Until next time,
Paul
