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Northern Light - Northern Light - Tallin - St Petersburg



Friday 17th July - Pene arrived late morning, along with Nigel and Victoria Steele, in a torrential rain shower. This was quite a refreshing change from all the hot weather that we had experienced during he trip to date., although I’m not sure that new arrivals agreed wholeheartedly with this sentiment. Dinner at the Tallin Yacht Club was very good. The Soviet style rather gaunt and crumbling premises were built for the  Russian Olympics on 1980, and had been pretty well neglected since. Tallinn however was delightful with the Old city especially, being a joy to wander around.

Friday night was also the famous ‘ drink my rum before the Ruski’s get it’ party, thrown most generously by Guyon and Ali onboard Widago, an impressive Leopard 48 catamaran, on which the family has embarked on an ambitious 'round the world’ cruise. Guyon is apparently referred to by his family as ‘ Captain Ahab’.
 Well no whales have been spotted yet by us, on this trip , let alone white ones!

 Highlights were :

The flying boat museum
The Living museum
The Old city
The people who were generally charming and friendly (except for the Russians)

I am told that the city is well known for its fleshpots and general night life, but unfortunately I seemed to miss much of this side of things.

Monday 20th July - 12.30 Set off from Tallin for Vergi, a delightful small harbour 50 or so miles East of Tallin. We motored initially but then had a pleasant sail downwind under tied out main and polled out genoa, which is a very settled rig for the HR 40. Arrived at 19.30 and moored alongside Kallinira, which in turn was moored alongside Tenace. The cockpit party on Dirk and Joelly’s Tenace was already in full swing and we did not need to be asked twice to join in. One of the better evenings with all on sparkling form, particularly Gerome, the skipper of Kallinira.

Tuesday 21st - 16.00 Set off from Vergi in the direction of St. Petersburg. We sailed due North towards the shipping lanes for three hours on a broad reach in 18 knots true in a moderate sea - most enjoyable, and then turned East towards our target. We arrived at Kronshtadt Island, the customer clearance area, at 12.30 the following morning, and immediately fell under the shadow of the Russian Bear. When our turn to be processed arrived the skipper (me), was on board with three Russian immigration men, plus a sniffer dog. There then followed a thorough search of the vessel during which they found some medication belonging to a crew member, which they didn’t recognise. This gave them a problem in that they could not dispose of the pills as they had found and recorded them at this point, but they could also not let us in with them. The problem was resolved by a UK doctor e-mailing a repeat prescription to the person involved, which was then supplied to the customs official.
The sniffer dog in the meantime couldn’t find any drugs as such and was more interested in sniffing me, being slightly ripe, following an overnight trip!
The whole process took nearly 5 hours.

The plus point of this exercise was Vladimir, and his daughter Marina, who with the patience of Job, navigated a path through the mindless, and somewhat paranoid bureaucracy, that seems to flourish in Russia. Vladimir was known affectionately by his apt nickname of 'Vlad the Enabler’, coined I believe by Griff Rees-Jones a decade or so ago. In fact to quote from his book ‘to the Baltic with Bob, he described Vlaimir as follows:

'Vladimir proved to be our blob of Russian anti-matter. Where Russia was inefficient, he was organised. Where it was bombastic , he was modest. Where it was demanding, he was helpful and attentive. He was Ukranian. Which meant a lot, apparently . He was just marvellous!'

miles to date 1159 nm





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