Amazing, how we're only five days into our boat ownership adventure and it seems like we've been here a month already!  Most of our time has been spent cataloging and organizing our storage, with multiple trips to Ikea and Bauhaus (a Home Depot-like store) for tools, crates and various storage containers.  Guillemette is our organizational genius and has been measuring, remeasuring and then allocating space for various items, be they foodstuff, tools, clothes, spare boat parts, current use boat parts, medications, safety equipment, sails,  etc.  

Today was super productive, with lots of progress at the ends of the boat.  At the stern (that's the back of the boat), we have a massive storage locker (a "lazarette") that we've been slowly filling with lines, spares and random things.  We tackled organizing this and while we were at it, Seth got our dockside water solution all set up and we got our huge backup anchor all sorted. 

We even found the perfect spot for the anchor (in the red bag)!

Once completed, we had our first Lazarette Family Meeting!

Then we moved to the opposite end of the boat (the "bow", which rhymes with "cow", not with "row"), where we have another huge storage locker, this one for sails.   This locker has two layers to it -- the lower section holds the bow thruster and two battery chargers and the upper section is available for sails.  There's a hatch between the two sections and the whole compartment is separated from the rest of the boat by a  watertight bulkhead.  This bulkhead, combined with a high volume pump at the bottom of the sail locker, is a safety feature designed to keep us afloat in the event that we hit something while underway. 

We store our two big offwind sails -- the Code 0 and the Blue Water Runner here.  The BWR is heavy enough that we used a halyard to hoist it out.  Seth was operating the winch while Guillemette and I managed the sail.  We then took the opportunity to explore the sail locker as a family!

Between organizing sessions, we did manage to escape from the dock for a quick overnight trip over to a place called Danholmen, which is a beautiful bay about 6 nm from here.  Given that this was the first time the three of us piloted our boat, and in fact piloted //any// boat in Sweden, we took it slowly.  The waterways here are very windey and often narrow, so there were a few exciting moments.   We started at the pin at the upper right hand corner of this chart and wound our way down to the pin at the bottom.   Yes, those are rocks and islands everywhere! 

We found navigation here to be a bit more difficult than we're used to.  We knew that the red buoys were on the right side of the channel when exiting (which is backwards from the US), but we couldn't always tell if we were, in fact, exiting.   The channels simply wind down the coast and sometimes the red buoys are on the right side and other times they're on the left side.  It was a bit before we remembered our chart-reading lessons which provided the necessary clues!  Guillemette and Seth each had a bit of helm time once we figured out our navigational challenges.   

Once we got there we put our dinghy to first use and Seth took me on a tour of the anchorage.  

The way back to Ellos on Monday was much easier, except that our chartplotters decided to bounce around and randomly change scale between 50 meters and 100 miles, making them mostly useless!    Quite the challange for us, but all ended well!   Once the waterway widened a bit we deployed our mainsail and our code 0 and had a really nice sail in.  

As we have gotten more comfortable in our new home, Guillemette has been breaking in our galley and has been keeping us happy with her awesome fresh meals.

Tomorrow's projects will include figuring out how to get our 100 pound outboard motor from the storage shed down to the boat and mounted on the dinghy.  We'll also tackle setting up our Starlink satellite broadband receiver.  

Thanks for reading!  Please keep the comments coming!