Sailing Positive Waves

Sunrise from the boat. Usually the mornings announce themselves by gradually going from pitch black nighttime to a lightening, but still dull, gray. Yesterday morning we had a rare, pink sunrise. As I was scrolling through my camera roll looking for pictures to add to this blog post, I saw a pattern. Rocks. Or houses. Or rocks and houses. And water, of course.  Standing on the northwest end of the island, looking south. Standing on the road just above where we are docked. If you look carefully, you can see the Christmas lights on Positive Waves. To the left of the picture, a small triangle of white lights.   Smögen is an astonishing little island. I can run from one end to the other in less than 30 minutes and as I'm running I can usually look in one direction and see houses jumbled together with seemingly no order or plan; or, I can look in the other direction and only see rocks and water. There is decidedly no sprawl here--the houses are clustered together, presumably to protect

Our winter home, looking southeast.   Since I last wrote, we moved across the harbor from what I thought was our winter home, Kungshamn, to our new winter home, Smögen. We'll stick around here for at least a few months.  Just down the dock from us. The small boat harbor, lined with little fishing sheds. Smögen is a little island that is hugely popular in the summer with over 35,000 summer residents and calm and quiet in the winter with about 1400 year-round residents. The weather is generally gray, wet, and dark--exactly what we were expecting from a west coast winter. And it's also windy, a lot of the time. When we first arrived it was blowing a consistent 35 knots with gusts over 40 knots. Hans was due to leave in less then a week and I was getting pretty nervous. We are in a very protected harbor, but no matter how protected we are from the waves, there's not much to block us from strong winds. We were heeling over at the dock, somewhat consistently, and the wind was lou