How to make your first love fall in love again.... this time with sailing!

There are many great relationships, where the man loves sailing, and the woman loves staying ashore. People have therefore asked me the question: "How did you get that woman to love sailing as well?". What I should have done, is use "Would you like to sail around the world with me?" as a standard pick-up line. The second question would then not be: "What is your favourite dish" or "What sports do you do" or even  "What music do you like?" no the second question would be: "Do you ever get sea sick?". But no... when I met Elizabeth, on the glacier, she made me quickly forget about the questions I should have asked, and instead we looked at the stars on the glacier, we looked in each others eyes and we fell in love. Only too late did I realise, that the woman I was now madly in love with had never sailed before in her life... However, sailingwise she did have a few things going for her, she was a surfer, and into kayaking, and I even managed to get her to like snow and water kite surfing. Stay tuned for how I got the love of my life into sailing.

The Plan: Happy couple sailing in fantastic weather

The North Sea in Spring is perhaps not the best place to take the Love of your Life sailing for the first time. That is, if you want her to go sailing with you ever again, and especially if you would like to sail halfway around the globe with her. The cunning plan, was to introduce Elizabeth gently into sailing, stacking all possible positive factors to my benefit that I could think off: Starting with a spacious 40 foot catamaran, filled with some of our best friends. Sailing Easter time in Greece - good weather guaranteed, and topped off with rounding Santorini, the most romantic island.

A spacious 40 foot Nautitech catamaran

Some of our best friends were joining on the trip - Thank you Amira for taking the picture

Easter in Greece - good weather guaranteed

I should have known better, and Lady Luck ended up teaching me a lesson or two. While back in  Norway is was the best Easter ever (30 degrees, blue sky, hardly any wind), in Greece it wast the worst Easter since the past 15 years. We experienced 12 degrees throughout the week, lots of rain, and multiple days with 35 knots of wind. (we decided not to sail on the day it was blowing a staggering 45 knots). Easter is to early for the Meltemi, so this was a "Normal" storm being thrown at us.

This was my worst scenario being realised. And, off course it could have been the end of the line, for a Relationship that included sailing. Even worse, this could have been the end of the line for A Small Boy with a Big Dream.  On Andy's birthday, we rounded Santorini in miserable weather. However, this made Andy's birthday cake taste all the better that evening.

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Santorini on Andy's birthday. A whole lot less romantic, in the rain and 12 C.

Making Andy's birthday cake taste all the better.

Sailing back to Athens in 35 knots

With the sun and a good friend, 35 knots does not look so bad

Mono hull passing by at 35 knots of true wind speed

Sharing the fun: helming in 35 knots on a wet, outlying helm station. We are still smiling :)

This radar reflector (btw it does NOT work as radar reflector) came down in Elizabeths face. The only reason this was a happy ending were the protective sunglasses.

To make matters worse, we did not have enough warm clothing (we were actually very well prepared for "typical" Greek weather, not for the Straight of Siberia), the Nautitech catamaran has an outlying, and very wet steering stand, we did not thrust the autopilot to steer us through these waves, so we had a very wet steering experience, and to top it all off, Elizabeth got a radar reflector hurled at her!!!

After this episode, Lady Luck had her way, and Elizabeth was put off sailing for the rest of her life. I am now working to get a professional crew to sail the boat to Australia with me. No! This is how it could have gone but it didn't. Elizabeth loves sailing, especially in bad weather. And even better, she did not get sea sick even once. Rather than Lady Luck stacking the odds against me, perhaps she knew that the only way to get Elizabeth into sailing, was to make it challenging enough.

This was later confirmed, by Elizabeth taking a sailing course in February in the Solent. Again it was blowing 35 knots. She came back, all smiles, and very confident with her sailing skills.  Now she says that sailing in light wind days is boring, and sailing only gets intersesting at 35 knots!

Thank you Lady Luck!

And thank you to our friends, who where there with us in Greece!!

 And most of all thank you Elizabeth, for falling in love again, this time with sailing!!!