TripSailor.com® Sailing Blogs

We were happily trapped in the Hallberg Rassy Varv (yard) marina Tueday and Wednesday due to strong winds, up to 35 knots one evening. Finally the wind died down and Thursday we made our move motoring around the point over to the Ellos Gasthamn, the guest moorage in the town harbor. A small step but we are officially out of the HR nest. Ellos is a beautiful town and the bakery is great! Even with this smaller and more maneuverable boat, docking is still our greatest challenge. Lets just say we are very happy for strong cleats and stem fittings and the heavy brass-covered rub rail on the hull of the boat! Once again we challenged the depth meter willing it to hold firm at 2.0m during the first 24 hours we are tied broadside to the dock. Following is a glimpse inside the world of the new boat owner outfitting for a major sail:

We have been worried for months that we had no way to easily receive weather reports. We finally ordered the key Navtex receiver through Vickie at HR Parts but relied on her local contacts to find us an installer. Finally Friday afternoon Henrik and Mikael, a couple of young marine electronics installation viking wiz-kids, came to the boat and within two hours had installed our Furuno Navtex receiver and antenna (key equipment to receive the daily english language weather reports and nav warnings we should have ordered as a factory option) and our Smart Radio 161 AIS receiver and VHF antenna splitter.

Since receiving the Navtex receiver from Vickie we had read the manual and install instructions, the install instructions for the Raymarine chartplotter and NMEA/Seatalk interface box and the Smart Radio and were creeping up on Plan B which was install everything ourselves. I had carefully arranged all the pieces on the saloon table spread out like chicken bones for examination by a witchdoctor trying to understand what connected to what. It didn’t look good. None of our hours of research led to the clear conclusion that we would be successful if we tried this install ourselves. Manufacturer and cruiser websites suggested an insurmountable conflict of baud rates and NMEA ports that would leave us with a choice between AIS or our DSC VHF and Navtex working, one or the other at any time.

Trying to impress Mikael with my knowledge of the subtlties of this electronic puzzle I said I thought we would not be able to get NMEA to the VHF or Navtex if we installed the AIS at the chartplotter. He looked at me sternly, his Billy Idol white blond hair framing an impassive Nordic stare and said  simply "no". And he was right. He and Henrik working briskly and purposefully like two heads on a single body from differnet ends of the multiple installations somehow got it all working. Unbelievably AIS targets creep about on the C70 chartplotter and position data arrives via the NMEA port on the Raymarine Interface box to both the Navtex receiver and the DSC VHF. A flatout miracle for which they charged us $50/hr each. Never had a better value in marine trades work.

The boat itself is an example of great value. The Hallberg Rassy product is really a better value than any other production boat I have looked at by far. You pay a little more but you get a lot more here. But HR boats come with a long list of line item options that don’t offer much explanantion and are difficult to picture unless a dealer has a boat with the option installled to show you. So when you screw up your options order don’t worry: buy the gizmo from Vickie and hire Henrik and Mikael to fix you up!

It has been a week and a half of stowing, outfitting, careful boat familiarizing and cautious test sailing and restowing but we are finally close to going somewhere…Norway. After we get our shore power transformer from Vickie Monday and charge the batteries to 100% we will head slowly north through the Bohuslan SW Coast of Sweden, check out of Sweden in Stromstad and check into Norway in Fredrikstad. From there up the Oslofjorden then west along the south coast to Kristiansand and around the corner north to Stavanger. Somewhere there we expect to take on crew, our friends Joel and Belen, then across the North Sea to Scotland. Stay Tuned.