Leg Three - Faroe Islands to Iceland

On July 7th at around 1300 after we returned to get Bent’s video camera, putting us back a couple of hours, it was nice to see the coast disappear behind us. Seeing the cliffs staggering down the coast, vanishing in the fog was one of those moments you don’t really forget.

Pointing our bow towards Seydisfjoerdur on Iceland, and with a nice breeze from the south we furled out the sails and made good headway. Averaging about 7knots the 260nm passage should take about 36hours. The first night went by nicely, except for some electronics going down for a period.

The wind died down at around 1100 so we decided to roll out the rest of the genoa, that we had reefed in during the night. But when it was all the way out, it dropped down four meters. We had snapped the halyard. Bent and Lars rushed on deck to save it from going in the water. They tried to pull it the rest of the way down, which meant that Lars had to go out on the 2,5meter bowsprit in 2meter swell to pull it down. But no luck, it was stuck somewhere on the forestay.

After some back and forth, they where able furl all the excess sail on the bottom of the forestay to keep it safe until we arrived on Iceland.

After such an eventful morning it was nice to get some nice hot food served out in the cockpit.

We got a satellite connection on board, so we can get up to date weather forecast during a passage. They showed that the strong winds that where forecasted, was going to appear sooner than on the forecast we got when we left the Faroe Island. This made it, so we had to sail straight thru it, to get to Seydisfjoerdur. We saw steady winds at around 25m/s and gusts up to 30m/s while we approached Iceland.

With the jib out and a well reefed main, we sailed on. We where amazed on how well the boat handled the wind, and with 60% of the crew sleeping thru it, we can conclude that it wasn’t that bad.

After sailing a bit up the coast of Iceland, we could finally turn into the fjord and motor for an hour into the town of Seydisfjoerdur at four in the morning on July 9th