Small Hops in Sunny Days

No sleep in for us in Båly since Russell had a job interview to do and needed some time and caffeine in order to look alive. But it was a beautiful sunny day which is always a good start!
While Russell was interviewing Angela got chatting with an older Norwegian guy sailing to Bergen who had lost his engine the day before and had a wee argument with the rocks… luckily not much damage though.
On our walk to the supermarket we were shocked at how different it was here to the west coast. It felt like we had ended up in a different country! Everything was incredibly dry - it was evident they had a much different summer down here.
There was a canal going through the town, or more like residential area, and every house seemed to have their own boat house attached instead of a garage. Cute place, but we saw few people and it almost seemed like a village just for show.

We left Båly late in the day and a made short hop to an anchorage for the night. A pretty anchorage between some islands and an early night to catch up on some sleep.
The next day was a day of going straight into the wind, so we decided it was a motoring day, but a short day. We threaded our way between islands and through small channels, appreciating that we had yet another sunny day.
We stopped in a very popular bay with a relatively tight entrance, and decided to try out tying up straight to the rocks. It took us a little while to figure out where we were going to sit well and where the bolts were we could tie up to, but for our first time tying to the rocks I think we did pretty well! The Norwegians who came in after us made it look easier for sure.
We rewarded our good work with a beer in the sun and it was so warm we went for a swim! Our first swim for over a month. This felt like being on holiday again and we wondered if we would have gotten bored if we had a proper summer…
Unfortunately, the rocks we tied to blocked our morning sunshine, so we had to have coffee on top of the rocks. A new perspective of our boat, looking down on it. I hadn’t seen what the top of our mast looked like before!
A little bit of rock climbing around the island and perving on the yachts along from us (we figured out one of them was over 1000 times more expensive than ours…) before going back to our now sunny boat for breakfast and get ready to move again.

We had planned to go in to Kristiansand, mostly to pick up a new clutch cone for our gearbox, however the guy hadn’t gotten around to looking at it yet or ordering it, so we skipped it entirely and anchored in a not so sheltered but quiet bay next to a potential mushroom forest. Unfortunately it did not end up being a mushroom forest.

From here in to Lillesand, there was a small channel called the Blindleia, between the mainland and many little islands that we could pass through, which was recommended by the Norwegian man mentioned earlier. It was a great sightseeing channel, many cute cabins and communities along the water, and still everything so dry… and the trees already had their autumn colours! What feels like summer to us is already autumn here. Some of the passages in the channel were also hilariously tight, barely wide enough for our yacht, and watching the bottom as we went through we really had to trust the charts!
Arriving in Lillesand we went straight for the Gelateria (of course).Read more