Well it's taken me at least 3 weeks longer than I anticipated to write this, the last entry in the 2012 blog, for which I offer my sincere apologies. However, we have been somewhat busy since coming home, spending our time catching up with old friends and relatives and trying to find a house. I am pleased to say that we have recently had our offer accepted on a house in our old village, Alderley Edge and with luck, it will be ours a few weeks before Christmas. However, it won’t be ready for us to move in until at least March 2013 as we intend renovating the bathrooms and kitchen and in order to do this, some walls need to come down/be moved, all of which takes time. Still, we are excited at the prospect of putting our own stamp on what is fundamentally a nice house with a lovely garden, one which we know we will be very content to spend our non-summer months in over the coming years.

Enough of that, now to summarise the last few days in Fehmarn and to provide a few statistics on the cruise.

Every end of season we have much the same routine, namely work for about 8 hours preparing the boat for the winter and then, if we have enough energy, we meet in a restaurant or pub with fellow CA members (mostly) and chat about our day and reminisce. This year was no different other than the fact that we had less to do, as we are commissioning quite a lot of work over the winter months. Some of this work includes new sails, pulpit alteration with new ladder at the bow, a pressurised seawater pump at the bow for washing mud off the anchor & chain, the hull to be polished and cleaned and the gouge repaired (the one done by the power boat in Sweden), the cabin to have the television removed and the space turned into a cupboard, new windows, new speed log and finally, the engine to have a new seal around the saildrive, new timing belt and the heat exchanger cleaned out. Phew! All of this would normally require the equivalent of a mortgage but as we have sold our house, we are (temporarily) relatively cash rich so I thought it was the right time to invest some money in our second home!

Turning to the facts & figures of the trip, see below :-


                           2010          2011        2012                                                                                      

Marinas                  £1975         £1709       £1195

Food & Drink         £1870        £1718       £1939

Fuel                        £1040         £776        £787

Washing (clothes)    £200          £136        £112

Public Transport       £330          £776         £83

Boat                      £3550         £873        £650

Meals out              £1090         £1478       £980

Miscellaneous         £790           £672        £944*

Hotels & Apartment £130          £725         £313

Total                      £10975        £8863      £7003

* Includes Rally expenditure

We travelled a total of 1613 miles during which we used the engine for about 190 hours. From Germany, we visited 3 other countries (Denmark, Sweden & Finland) before returning, having overnighted in 71 different harbours and anchorages, the vast majority of which (ie all but a handful) were new to us. We were on the boat, away from Fehmarn, for a total of 104 nights, which very roughly speaking is £70.00 per day, all in. What a bargain!!!!

Next year we plan to leave these shores a little later, as we have a weekend booked with some old friend from IBM in early May. Once we’re on our way, we intend turning 'to the left’ and visit the west coast of Sweden and the south of Norway, before returning via Denmark. That is the plan and until then, this is the last blog entry for this year. It would, however, be rude of me to end this without a special thank you to our old friends Pete & Gaynor Answer, who have, for yet another year, diligently printed off the blog entries and posted them to my dear mum in North Wales, thereby enabling her to keep up with our adventures. From the three of us (including mum) thank you both!

Finally, to summarise the cruise – we had fun, we met lots of people and had friends with us on board so the good times were legion, the weather could have been warmer but given the catastrophic weather back in the UK, we did very well indeed. We loved the islands and are very much looking forward to going back in that direction in 2014 and this year, we also had the very great pleasure of attending the CA Rally, so my final word of thanks is to Janet & Horst Safarovic, who did such a splendid job ( we knew they would!) of organising it. That’s it from me for this year. See you in 2013!!