The idea of finding a boat together begun during our 2018 vacation sailing trip. After sailing around the Danish island Sjælland in Marcus' Express the dream of a larger boat that could take us further away started to grow. The idea of a floating home that we could take on all possible adventures around the world sounded too good to be ignored, and the search for finding a boat begun.
Finding the right boat was not easy! When we found Linnea in late April 2019 we had almost given up hope that we would find a boat for that season. We had looked at a couple of boats during the passed year, but not much compared to the Linjett 40 that we met in Denmark the previous year. When Linnea appeared on "Blocket" (a Swedish website for selling and buying used items) everything went super fast, and 3 weeks later we had signed the contract and started the sail home with OUR boat. It took us 25 hours to reach our slip in the Lagunen marina.
A little more than a month after arriving to Malmö it was time for our first vacation with Linnea, two weeks of sailing in our home waters, Öresund. The plan was to move back to the apartment when getting back from vacation, but we enjoyed boat life so much that we simply collected some more clothes and work things and just stayed. It was a natural transition. Every evening it felt like having vacation, spending time in the harbour with amazing sunsets. Our marina is pretty unprotected from fall and winter storms so we decided to move Linnea to another marina just a few nautical miles north, to stay the comming winters aboard.
When we bought Linnea she wasn't used a lot. She had some scruffs and marks, but nothing to serious. More or less all of the equipment she came with was original from 2004. The longer we have lived aboard and the more we have used her as our home and way of travel, we have quickly learnt what things still work and what needs replacements. We have agreed that it is important that we can trust our boat and that the equipment will always work, no matter what. So we spend our time upgrading stuff that we can't trust, and improving things so that they work the way we want them to. It was a looooong time since this lady got the attention she deserves!
Of course we also need more equipment. The equipment we have is mainly fitted for coastal sailing, and since we dream of sailing further we need more navigation and safety equipment. We also need equipment for being able to live full time on Linnea, even in remote places. We try to find second hand equipment where it's possible, and we make all adjustments and maintenance ourselves. Some things must to be done and some things we do just because we want to.
Having a goal is important, and our goal is to sail away and leave Sweden in May-June 2021. Hopefully the world will have opened up until then, and we can move freely. We'll see what happens, but for now that is the finish line we have in sight. We will start making videos to update about our travels and we hope you'll like to follow us along on our journey!
As it was time for us to take our decision to quit our jobs or not we were in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. After a lot of thinking back and fourth we decided to postpone our trip until 2022. In the end we didn't feel comfortable taking the decision to go travel the world when everything is upside down and we can't even sail to Denmark which is literally just an hour away otherwise. The new date is set to April 2022 and our hope is that the world will once again be more open for travel by then. Until then we now have more time to finish all those projects that we have on our todo list, and a long summer for sailing and testing all the upgrades.
On April 26th, we left our home port in Malmö and set sails for our big adventure. Hope you'll follow us along!