Three weeks of good sailing, brought the Europa from her home in Netherlands to the subtropical Canary Islands. After a couple of shorter trips during the last months and over a year of maintenance, she set sail on the 7th of September from Scheveningen, arriving to Santa Cruz de Tenerife harbour on the 27th.

Here we had time for preparing the next adventure, sailing across the Atlantic Ocean to Uruguay, where she plans to make her moorings on Montevideo port in just about over 40 days after setting sail again. For the moment she lays alongside the busy city harbour, while the permanent crew makes her ready for the crossing. Some of them will leave the ship here while others are joining to continue the sailing trip. With all of them hands-on from up aloft to the depths of the lower fore-peak in about four days once more the Europa is ready to continue her adventures. Cabins and the rest of the ship called for a good clean, bed linen had to be washed, provisions needed to be embarked and fuel bunkers for our diesel tanks had to be loaded. Maintenance as usual, is always ongoing on board, with some sails to repair, hull cleaning, oiling and varnishing pinrails. In the meantime engineers always keep themselves busy running and repairing all sorts of ship’s systems.

All preliminaries for such a trip we are about to undertake, that always take time and effort from the permanent crew, before the ship is ready to welcome four new Voyage crew members and the rest back on board tomorrow. After the night aboard we are all about to sail the first long ocean crossing in the Europa after she  stood still during the worst of the COVID pandemic times, once she got into Dutch ports on her long voyage from Ushuaia last year, all with a couple of short parenthesis setting sail in the North Sea. We all hope that’s the beginning again of the ship’s return to her restless sailing, from which she has earned the nickname of Ocean Wanderer. Hopefully she will resume the sailing experiences that used to offer throughout different sort of trips, including Tall Ship Races, Ocean crossings, and during winter regularly providing the unmatched experience of visiting Antarctica.