"Per Elmsäter" wrote:

So it's getting time to hit the dirt with our boats

Wait a minute, am I reading this right? You're still sailing and Mooron's boat
has been out of the water for a while now?

...... and we decided to give
it one last crack this weekend. The skipper from our Around Gotland boat a
Facil 355 XO started calling around a couple of weeks ago and everyone was
really up to the idea of a last Archiplelago Raid in november. So much so
actually, that everybody wanted to take an extra day off and leave early
friday morning.

So we did. The weather was horrible throughout the weekend. With a constant
drizzling rain but no real showers. However the wind was a steady 20-25
knots throughout the trip and we had some awesome sailing slaloming between
the Islands and rocks. We thought we were going to be alone at this time of
year but we actually saw three other sailboats.

The temperature was about 7 degrees Celsius, both in the air and the water.
We dressed warm and had absolutely no problems staying warm with our three
layer systems from Musto. The only mistake I did was to not bring my skiing
gloves or something. I just had two pair of summer sailing gloves and there
was no way to keep my hands warm once they got wet. I ended up wearing no
gloves and keeping my hands warm in my pockets between handling the sheets.
When at the helm I could keep my gloves dry and had no problems.

I've found that if you wear those stretchy surgical type gloves inside regular
sailing gloves, your hands never get wet and it helps them keep warm. Not really
really warm, but warmer than they'd be either bare or in wet gloves.



The first night (snip for brevity)....

Sounds like awesome sailing, a worthy closure for the season. As for saunas I'm
not enthusiastic about them, in our climate we get about seven months of sauna
already, but no snow to roll in.

Fresh Breezes- Doug King