This moment we’ve been waiting for the whole winter finally arrived on Tuesday 15TH of May. We arrived to the railway station of Turku fully loaded with various bags and the countdown showed that we still had 3 hours and 10 minutes until Suwena would be lowered to the water of river Aurajoki.
Five days passed in a blink while preparing Suwena for the summer cruise. On Tuesday and Wednesday masts were raised and rigging tuned. The rest of the week we unpacked countless boxes, organized cupboards, cleaned the yacht inside out, counted spare parts and tested on board equipment.
This summer season is different because Suwena will first time make a one-way cruise. We have now equipped our summer home so that it really is our second home and we can travel with only two suitcases allowed on airplane back to Oulu.
From that you can guess that just the box list is long and detailed. Some of them we carried to the boat already during our boatyard visit in April. The rest were send as freight to Turku. And of course there were countless bags and rucksacks with us on train. It is fun to buy all kinds of things but finding a proper storage onboard Suwena for everything is not so exciting. On Friday evening it felt really good to sit down in clean and organized summer home to enjoy some white wine we have deserved for sure.
At the same time we have organized the boat we have been testing all onboard devices. In autumn when we lifted her for the winter storage everything was operating properly. However it is always possible that for example during the lifting or transportation some leads will get disconnected. We like to test everything before we leave so we do not get any nasty surprises during our trip.
So far the only bigger problem has been with the generator. When we tried to start the generator its display stayed dark. Andrus got the multimeter and the battery voltage was only 6 volts while it should be over 12. No wonder there was no action in the generator.
Suwena was connected to shorepower during the winter storage in boatyard and both the service batteries and engine start batteries were full. We will still need to find out if the generator starting battery should be charged from shorepower or not. Anyhow Andrus went to a local hardware store and bought a separate battery charger. We think the generator will start after the battery is fully charged.
While we were setting up Suwena, next to her was the delivery of brand new Nauticat 37. Happy boat owners Hasse and Inga-Lis familiarized themselves with a new yacht by the same way we did last year. The new boat was named Easycat and her home port is Vaxholm located near Stockholm. We spent together few nice evenings exchanging boating experiences. In addition we got some nice clues about secret anchorages in Stockholm Archipelago. I’m sure we have time to visit some of them on our way to the Göta canal.
Hasse is also the chairman of Sweden’s Nauticat club. The Swedish club has several activities during the summer. We wish good winds to you Hasse and Inga-Lis on your maiden voyage with Easycat towards Åland and Sweden.
We hope on Sunday we will go sailing. We are eager to finally enjoy Suwena at her best. We still have some points to check but we can already see our departure day is getting closer.