Claes Nycander & S/Y Ambra

on board myself, Martin from Spain and Jerome from France, we had a fast sail down the coast of West Africa to Dakar. Not a bad place Hann, one can take up the boat there on the beach and it is a nice yacht club. The downside is that is very dirty in the water, they have a sour coming out right where we had to anchor. So we only stayed there for 4-5 days and did not even check in.

Then onwards south to Gambia where we after a week at Lamin Loge spent a month going up The Gambia river all the way to Basse, Santa Su..

Gambia is the best...
There is no criminality. The people are the nicest I have ever come by and it is so cheap that you can't believe it. Crocodiles, hippos, monkey, whales, dolphins and lots of really funny episodes with my crazy crew.

We left Lamin Loge and Gambia for Barbados..
and the Atlantic crossing the 8th of Jan 2010 and arrived the 28th of Jan, 20 days. Martin and Jerome quickly found a boat towards South Am. I stayed in Barbados for a month and half, spending my time with Pia Gefvert and her friends & staff at the Green Snapper. Then on to Martinique..

24 hrs to Martinique...
and then stayed for two weeks in Le Marin just south of Fort de France, looking for work but could only find some small things for other Swedish boats that I met there. So next place with work possibilities was St Martin and it took something like three days to get there. Had to stop and sleep in Guadeloupe. It's hard to find time and space to sleep when you sail between the islands. You don't want to fall asleep to deep and end up on the rocks or crash in to some other boat for that matter.

St Martin was good to me..
met a lot of nice people and after a couple of weeks I found work on the Dutch side, in the coolest sailor bar Lagoonies Bistro and Bar, where I was employed as bartender. I was the planning to stay there over the summer & and hurricane season but the gods wanted different and I decided to go back to Europe.

The 21st of May 2010 after 2 months I took of from St Martin heading for Azores..
I had sold my AIS system to May and Bengt on S/Y Tima when I thought that I was staying in St Martin, and when I decided differently, e.i. to sail back, I thought that I didn't really need to have one, but that proofed to be a very bad decision.

After maybe 10 days at sea I had a close encounter with a large Russian freighter..
It was around ten o'clock at night and I was watching a film, suddenly I hear the sound of water breaking in front of the boat, like a surf-wave, and thought what the hell is that, a tsunami.. then the boat lifts and I get a huge breaking wave right over the deck, by now I start to get a little nervous and head for the cockpit, but I don't have to even go up there, just by looking from the hatch I can see that I got the side of a freighter dragging right along the side of Ambra. There is lots of noise as my teak railing drags the side of the freighter, my jenny (jib) is kind of sticking to their side and the top of my mast is of and on scraping their side as well. This goes on for maybe 10 secs and then I am past it.. Ambra swings around 180 degrees as I come out behind the freighter and I have to see to get her back on course.. Then I contacted the freighter by VHF and but the person on the other side says, with a Russian accent, that they have no ship/boat behind them and just hang up when I ask for the name of the ship. When I continue to try to get them they just do not answer.. However I am sure that they saw me because I do not think the engines was running when we collided, I could not hear anything, and they where going really slow, maybe 5-8 knots only. Nothing really happened to Ambra, except for two lights in the masts broke and the genoa, large jib, was painted red plus I got lots of rust and pieces of metal mixed with paint on the deck. I collected samples of this stuff and thought it could be good to have in court one day.
Today I think that it was just as much my own fault that it happened, I did have lights, but not the strong lanterns but small LED lights, and I had an radar reflector - but I was not keeping a good watch and I had no AIS, and that is the real lesson. With an AIS this would not have happened, at least if they had theirs on...I was sailing together with Einar and Lisa on S/Y Woy, and if the shit had really hit the fan and I had started sinking I guess that I could have contacted them via SSB, shortwave radio. They where not more then 100 miles away when this happened.

The rest of the trip to Azores went without problems, I guess that I was quite shocked and had a little hard to relax in the beginning but after three four days tings where back to normal and the freighter incident was more like a bad dream. The Scandinavian /MM-network at 11:30 UTC 14325 kHz was really helpful all the way and another network Southbound II - Herb's Weather http://www3.sympatico.ca/hehilgen/vax498.htm was really helpful to get information to avoid the many low pressures that was on the same rute as I.

Horta in Azores was nice..
there was lots of boats there it was fun to finally meet many of the people that I had contact with via the shortwave radio. To mention some, Tommy & Helena on S/Y Bonnie of Stockholm, May and Bengt on S/Y Tima, Harald and Christel on S/Y Aurora.
For some reason my main GPS had stopped working on the way but I was lucky and could borrow one from Lasse Alberbo on on S/Y Inga. One week in Horta and then I was off for

Olhao on the Algarve coast of Portugal..
Strong winds all the way got me there in 8 days. Olhao is a really nice place for sailors.. One enters like a large tidal lagun and after that you are totally protected from the sea at least. The wind can get quite hard and we did get a short storm there one day. However it's all soft sand dunes all around and nothing really bad can happen.
Stayed there for approx. a week and then off for..

La Linea and Gibraltar to see my daughter Isabel Carolina Gibbon Nycander..
and pick up a lot of stuff that I had left there almost two years earlier.