I’m back home at our home in Tokyo, and MaRe is at Yokohama Cotton Harbor Boat Yard on the hard.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
10 days ago, on the 8th at exactly 1200 we arrived at boat yard. I didn’t believe myself that we made it exactly until the ETA announced in the early morning hours by email to the boat yard.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
At the beginning of the night sail we had incredibly good winds. See the previous narration.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Already during my watch, the wind weakened. All night long the winds went down to 1-2 Bft – which is no sailing wind at all – for several times and increased again. Normally, outside in the open sea, I get the sails down and drift until the wind comes back. In this night, I used the engines for two reasons.\u00a0First, for safety reasons. We were in the vessel highway into Tokyo Bay, and later in the Tokyo Bay. There is quite a lot of traffic in this area. This traffic can require quick movements out of the way of priority vessels.\u00a0Second, we needed to reach the boat yard early, to have enough daylight to get MaRe out of the water.\u00a0So until our arrival at the boat yard we sailed and motored depending on the wind to always have a propulsion for immediate maneuvers.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Then was the famous Yokohama Bay Bridge already ahead of us and the wind was stronger again. I was attempted to sail under the Yokohama Bay Bridge, but didn’t want to ask a crew member for another unfurling of the genoa, just for the last 2-3 NM.\u00a0When Tobi came out into the cockpit and looked at the huge bridge ahead of us, he suddenly mumbled that it would be nice to sail through under the bridge.\u00a0Two minutes later MaRe was sailing again.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It was a bit impressive to sail under this 65 m high bridge I used often when living in Tokyo. Actually, when the bridge was just opened, good friends, Debbie & Ian, took me with them for a ride over the Yokohama Bay Bridge on a Sunday. We stopped at the side lane and had a view from this brand new bridge.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
After the bridge was just behind of us, we looked out for the final point, the dock of the Cotton Harbor Boat Yard. Having the coordinates in the chart plotter is one part, the other is to recognize the spot.\u00a0When the genoa was furled and we were running with the engines, Tobi recognized the big signboard ahead, and I saw some people standing at a floating pier in front of the channel for a traveler lift. I waved and they waved back. This was the confirmation that they were the people looking us and we were looking for them.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The docking was smoothly and we were asked to wait a bit. No problem at all. We arrived. For me it was the end of my almost 5 year looong sail from Europe to Japan.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Before MaRe was hauled out, we needed to leave the pier for a short time so that they could launch another boat, hanging already in the traveler lift.\u00a0Then it was our turn. Carefully, the haul out team pushed and pulled MaRe into the traveler lift channel and positioned the belts at her bulkheads.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
When we were just hanging in the belts up in the air, my OBM arrived. It was nice to see her again life and not only in a Signal video call. The officers from customs were also waiting…<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I think I’ll write narrations about the time I spent in Tokyo, traveling forth and back from home to MaRe to do the work I need to do in both places.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m back home at our home in Tokyo, and MaRe is at Yokohama Cotton Harbor Boat Yard on the hard. 10 days ago, on the 8th at exactly 1200 we arrived at boat yard. I didn’t believe myself that we made it exactly until the ETA announced in the early morning hours by email […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2004,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2026-posts","category-japan"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1668"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2006,"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1668\/revisions\/2006"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}