Day 2
I get briefly woken up in the early morning by a WOHOOO scream from the helmsman standing on deck above my head. I guess they were surfing down a wave. After a while, my first mate and now my good friend Alex comes down from his shift. I get a real view of what a mariner’s workday looks like. I hear many “mm’s” and “so great!” when the crew eats the meal I manage to cook while heeling over. No need to guess—I feel at home on FALKEN. The starry nights, sunsets, and spinnaker sailing are extra bonuses.
After a few nice days in Marstrand, including boat preps, we set out tacking down the Gothenburg archipelago to get checked out. We sailed upwind into the night across to Skagen, and right now we are on the west coast of Denmark, bound to cross the North Sea over to the UK.
Hold fast!
David the apprentice
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”For some things, we will never be ready.” - Moana 2
After 852 miles of open ocean sailing, the crew of Falken dropped anchor in Moorea's Cook's Bay—not with a quiet glide in, but surfing down waves in a squall, breaking speed records and cheering each other on through the rain. What started as a plan to "just dip a toe" into offshore sailing turned into something harder to explain: the worse the conditions got, the more alive everyone felt. Turns out the question was never whether the crew was ready—it was whether they even needed to be.
Kauehi conundrum
Kauehi atoll was always on the itinerary—until the forecast made it a gamble not worth taking. Squalls, bommies, a tidal pass, and no clean escape route: sometimes the hardest call in sailing is the one that keeps you out of a place, not in it. The Tuamotus will have to wait.
Hove-to!
Falken is too fast—a problem most sailors would kill for, yet here we are, tacking back and forth across the Pacific just to kill time. A rogue low pressure system south of Tahiti has stolen the trades and scrambled our timing for the tidal window into Kauehi's pass, leaving us hove-to 45 miles short of our target in the Tuamotus. Salt licorice, dream sandwich debates, and a philosophical question about mermaid reproduction are helping pass the night.