Back to Germany day, today, or that was the plan. It all depended upon the wind abating and veering more to the SW. Now the forecasts, to be fair ( I use at least 3 and the one I really like now is called ‘Windy’ – it’s very up-to-date in terms of technology and the model that it uses and as it gives an animated picture of events, it is very effective. Here is the URL if you’re interested :- https://www.windy.com/54.783/10.811?54.602,10.811,9,m:fctagtc

Windy predicted (as did the other sites such as Windfinder and Windguru and the Danish met office https://www.dmi.dk/danmark/) that the fresh on-the –nose wind for making Fehmarn would veer to the SW and then die down so if this sequence of events occurred in the morning, as forecast, then we could leave and sail for a while and motor the rest. All that remained for me to do was to convince my reluctant crew that it was worth venturing out and that it wasn’t all a waste of time and that we would make progress against the rough sea and that the sea would die down and that and that and that – you get the picture? It was at least a sunny day and in time, speaking of sunny, the crew’s disposition did improve over the morning as all her worst fears were allayed.

We cast off at 11:45 and initially had to motor into the wind and sea as we needed to round Langeland’s point before we could bear away and sail in the SW F4 breeze. This lasted all of 45 minutes when it had abated to around 8 knots, not enough to give us sufficient groundspeed to get to our initial port on Fehmarn, a new one to us called Lemkenhafen, situated inside the shallow lagoon where Orth is and where we go at the end of the season. I therefore started the engine and for the next  hour or two, we motor-sailed but eventually there was no wind at all and no benefit to be derived by having the sails up so they  were furled and we continued on our way. Sometime during the afternoon, as we were approaching Orth lagoon, I decided to check the weather for tomorrow and saw that the wind was due to revert to its favourite location, blowing from the east. That meant that we would have it in our faces again as we headed on to our home port of Burgstaaken and wishing to avoid that, we decided to abort our Lemkenhafen plan and continue on to Burgstaaken, arriving at 17:15, a total journey time of 5. 5 hours and 36 miles covered.

We managed to berth CW in our favourite location, at the hammerhead on the end of the farthest pontoon from the facilities – that is the downside but on the plus side, the view is nice and particularly when head to wind, as we were and getting the full benefit of the warm afternoon sun in the cockpit. As it was Sunday and we were back ‘home’, we celebrated with iced g&t’s as aperitifs and then went to one of the local restaurants, one called ‘Lotsenhus’, where there is a waitress that speaks excellent English and the food is pretty good too! Julie had her usual matjes  (soused young herring) served with beans and bratkartoffeln (fried potatoes with onion with bacon lardons and green pepper – tasty but calorific) and I had a whole, beautifully fresh plaice, also with lardons and bratkartoffeln (see photo, the plaice looks as big as Julie! (it wasn’t, not quite)). These substantial meals plus large glasses of wine and beer cost just under €45, not bad value at all.

On the way back to the boat we made a detour to Weilandt’s boat sheds, to see whether we could extricate our car for our use over the next couple of days but it was well and truly blocked in, so forget that – it’s bike time! As we had some ice left, we had a whisky each and enjoyed another episode of ‘Ghosts’ – a BBC comedy we found on iPlayer which appeals to us. Basically a young couple inherit an old, haunted house (haunted by generations of ghosts), the young wife suffers a near death accident and when she recovers, she can see and talk to them but of course no-one else can. Have a look, it’s quite fun, in an innocent sort of way. We did try watching a comedy that the critics raved about and quite honestly, we were shocked by its vulgarity and just plain lack of funniness – it was called ‘Fleabag’ and I thought it was a marker as to how decadent our society has become if this is considered modern humour. Right, off my soapbox.