July: Living Aboard
Scandinavia is known for its light summers, where the sun shines from 3 am to 23 p.m. An often forgotten aspect, however, is the existence of clouds and their influence on the meteorological situation up here on these high latitudes. The chart to the left would make even the most enthusiastic Sweden-fan become hesitant. In the week starting 9 July and ending 15 July, for example, the sun shone the quoted number of hours - during the entire week, that is! In souther Sweden, this meant 5 full hours of sunshine, which could have happened any time between early morning to late night in these bespoke 7 days! I admit: we missed it!
It was to become a dreadful start of the summer. Well, using the word "start" indicates at least our hope of a possible future improvement. We seemed to wait in vain, since even long into July, it had not changed to the better, yet. Instead, we experienced pouring rain and gales every other day.

We were lucky, however, since we at least could live onboard during these weeks when we still had to work in the office awaiting our annual vacation planned to start in mid July, all while Karolina's brother with family from Arizona visited us. "Ohhhh, that's coooool", was a standard expression of them. For the first time, this so very American expression suddenly got a meaning to me, since I couldn't have said it better myself! Swimming was out of question, even for us tough Vikings, since water temperature this July was barely 10 degrees C (50F).
Our decision to happily letting Karolina's American family live in our house, while we moved onboard Regina, was, by many, regarded with disbelief and compassion. We just loved it! Living onboard gave a scent of freedom. If not we currently could sail away, at least there were plenty of guest boats visiting "us", which was almost just as good. Freezing weather couldn't take that away from us!

It was still difficult to explain to others, why we enjoyed crawling into our cozy nest every night, listening to the howling wind, slamming halyards on neighbor boats and tapping raindrops. After each cozy night with fresh cool air running down onto us through the hatch and with the heater's thermostat adjusted to a comfortable temperature, we were woken up by the early sound of propulsion, sometimes flavoured with the aggressive yell of a bow-thruster, proving the existence of muscular technology controlled by early captains steering out of the harbour. We then knew for sure: we were among them - the cruising community - unified with these vagabonds of the seas, all these wonderful and interesting cruising people with open minded thoughts and unlimited horizons.

Who cared about the fact that we, at that particular day, would not cast off, yet, and, instead, go to work? We enjoyed breakfast in the cockpit, most often under our spray hood extension for protection, waving to passing sailing boats carrying ensigns from distant places. Many Germans, countess Dutch, of course Swedish, Danish and Polish and sometimes even French and British boats were coming and leaving.
In the afternoons, when new guest boats entered, we were often already down at the harbour, giving them a hand or letting Jessica and Jonathan play with boat-kids from other yachts or their pals who's parents are running the guest harbour. We often got interesting neighbors, some of which even said they had red our web-page and thus recognized Regina. So, if we currently couldn't cruise the world, at least the world cruised to us, during July.
"Boat kids" visiting, watching a movie on DVD while the rain was pouring outside

Life onboard is so simple and straight forward. So little hassle and so much more time to concentrate on more important things of life. Time spent cleaning and tidying was miniature, since we didn't have so many possessions to spread around. And to vacuum-clean the few square meter that our cabin floor made up, was done in a minute. Washing up took some more time, but then again, it was almost a nice evening therapy to stand in the galley doing the dishes while Jessica and Jonathan were getting ready for bed. Everything was allowed to take its time and you performed one thing after the other, in series so to speak, instead of the normal parallel life we have ashore, where we try to perform many different tasks simultaneously.

Asking Jessica and Jonathan if they missed anything from the house, they could not come up with anything. Not a singe item! Well, what, I asked myself, is then filling up their rooms back home!?!

And besides, why don't we always live like this? Think of all the taxes we would save! And the heating cost! Bills for electricity and water! And the garden that needn't to be looked after! People would pay a fortune for the view we enjoy looking over the sea from our cockpit, had it been a house. And neighbors is also no issue, since if you don't like them, which actually very seldom happens, new will eventually come in other boats.
We enjoy one of the few sunny days on the aft deck cutting and preparing our long mooring lines (3 x 50m) which we, from then on, jokingly call our "Panama lines"
But OK, one thing helped making life much simpler during the children's summer holiday: They didn't have to be at school at 8 am sharp. During our month moored on the dock living aboard, we had no stress in the mornings, since our office hours were just a little more flexible than usual. Luckily, we run our own business and nobody could blame us if we entered the office door after having first washed up the dishes, talked to some nice sailing guys and exchanged a word or two with the local sailing instructor in port.

Not having to chase minutes converted our normally very hectic life into an easy going lifestyle, so even with the weather as it was, we had some wonderful weeks at the dock.

Almost like "real" cruising adventures!