2025 on Merrimac

Arriving in Suriname by sailing yacht (2025 edition)

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 21:18:35 +0100

I’d already heard that the arrival procedure for Suriname had changed last year, but I hadn’t expected it to have gone this digital, let alone that it would actually work! For those coming after me, here are a few tips on the what and the how.

Crossing

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 18:41:16 +0100

Tomorrow morning we make landfall, Suriname in the first light, but my heart is still bobbing along on days made of nothing but water.

Water everywhere, and yet never the same: from whispering ripples to waves flexing their muscles, colours that shift like thoughts at the horizon.

1800 miles down, 150 to go

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 17:57:30 +0100

It’s already the 9th and last full day at sea. We expect, with a high degree of certainty, to reach the fairway buoy sometime tomorrow morning. After that it’s still a decent stretch up the river, but we’ll be there in plenty of time for a few Djogos with bitterballen.

Where the name "Merrimac" comes from

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 17:42:09 +0100

I often get asked where the name “Merrimac” comes from. Well, here’s the story!

Merrimac is the Native American name of a river in New Hampshire, these days spelled the modern way, Merrimack. It means swift current, so not a bad omen.

Sinterklaas

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 15:12:32 +0100

Yesterday, out of the blue, I got a message from what I think was a female Sinterklaas helper …

🎁 A Sinterklaas Poem for the Men on the Boat 🎁

Dear sailors, gathered on this floating home, Sint greets you warmly, even far across the foam. One among you had never heard of Sint before— But with kruidnoten tasted, he’s part of the lore. Chocolate pepernoten sealed the deal just right, And so Sint brought a gift for him tonight.

The Big Crossing

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 13:38:00 +0100

It’s now Wednesday afternoon, 3 December, and we left Mindelo at around half past ten, bound for Suriname (Paramaribo). The distance is still 1853 miles as the crow flies, and we expect to arrive in about 10 days.

We spent a day being driven around the island of São Vicente with a driver and guide, and our main conclusion was that it is indeed bone dry. The fact that it then rained four times during the rest of the week was something even the locals couldn’t explain. It was the first time in years that it had rained outside the rainy season.

Mindelo!

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 20:35:30 +0100

At a quarter past five we arrived at the marina in Mindelo. Waiting for a marina guy, mooring to a buoy with the stern to the pontoon, dinghy off, Watt&Sea off, lines made fast, dinghy on deck, sail cover on. Now for a cold one, and then straight off to the floating bar! Tomorrow we clear in and tidy up this post… and fix the watermaker.

Hooray, it's someone's birthday!

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 16:04:02 +0100

According to the calendar it’s Friday today. And since we left on Tuesday, that makes this our fourth day at sea already. The days run into one another. You stand a four-hour watch at night and you spend all the hours around it sleeping, or trying to. So even if you come off watch at 8 in the morning, by the second morning at the latest you figure out that it’s smarter to go and get a bit more sleep.

First Day and Night at Sea

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 14:33:40 +0100

First day and night out on the open sea, the wind lifts us up and we sail along free. Nine knots go singing past the bow, the land fades out, there’s only horizon now.

Waves are rushing, whitecaps dance, seasickness seemed to stand no chance. But then the tortilla, warm and good, sent me outside faster than I thought it would.

On the way to Saudade

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 16:56:11 +0100

Right, we’ve just put on the album Miss Perfumada by Cesaria Evoria, because we’re almost out of Spanish waters.

Tanneke and Kommer Jan arrived on Saturday evening after what was a pretty long flight. Lovely to see them again! We had three evenings of truly wonderful Spanish food in random, good-looking restaurants. Selection criterion: are there enough Spaniards eating there too? The food here is much better seasoned than in Portugal, we have to give them that. And I now understand the whole “Mañana” thing a bit better: they do turn up today, but they only bring half of it. It took until Monday before I had the dinghy complete; the Honda coupling did surface in the end.

New dinghy (work in progress)

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 16:47:39 +0100

The day before yesterday it was already time to take Marion to the airport. She’d been flat out at home with all the Milûk business and caught up on plenty of sleep. Read a good book (“What We Can Know” by Ian McEwan), drove up the volcano, explored the town, played one round of golf, mostly ate well, and not much else. She needed it! The weather had something to do with it too: during her last few days it rained in south-east Tenerife for the first time in a year, with plenty of wind as well. On the day we drove up to the Teide volcano there were big waves in the north-west corner, and once again a few tourists won a Darwin Award (hopefully). People had been advised, or even forbidden, to go out on the quay, but you’re not a tourist for nothing, and stubborn with it. Three dead… It even made the eight o’clock news on Dutch TV, so I in particular got quite a few messages asking if we were all right! Nothing going on where we were. In the days after, with the wind veering around, there was a bit of a jiggle in the harbour, but nothing alarming.

The Crossing and Our First Week on Tenerife

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 11:54:05 +0100

After a good week, Arnold came back to reinforce the crew. One last quick visit to Paz, and the very next day we were off again because of the weather forecast. Plenty of wind on the first day this time, but if we waited we’d have to motor the whole way. Neither of us felt particularly at ease for the first two hours. There was a really nasty chop, so bad that we didn’t dare hoist the sails. For the non-sailors: when the waves are very short and steep, heading into the wind to hoist the mainsail is pretty tricky. The boat takes a real pounding, so if we don’t have to, we don’t. So it was a matter of motoring on until we reached properly deep water. After about two hours the depth was a few kilometres again and the waves had lengthened. Up with the sails, and off we go! She was sailing beautifully again.

A Glass of Madeira

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 10:17:07 +0100

Marion came aboard in Tenerife last night, 6 November 2025, arriving on the very same plane that Arnold was taking home. Funny, because they even got to say a quick hello: Arnold was still in the check-in queue when Marion came out. Apparently more people are starting to read the blog, because I’ve had complaints about the lack of updates. I’d also just found out from my mother that she couldn’t get onto it. So this morning Marion gets a lie-in and I get the blog up to date. It’s high time, too, because the website turned out to have some technical trouble as well. As an experiment I had decided to put Cloudflare in front of merrimac.nl. It turns out that if you get as few visitors as I do, it doesn’t help and actually works against you. Worse performance than without Cloudflare, so I quickly switched it off again. And now I’m updating the blog in double-quick time, because I’m a month behind!

Centro Nautico Algés

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 15:56:21 +0200

It’s Sunday 5 October today, and I’ve been back on the boat for a week already. Plenty of boat jobs have been done again, including yet more changes to the navigation “black box” space.

Since the deckhouse now runs entirely on B&G chartplotters with beta software, it seemed sensible to have a backup on a different system. That turned out to be an Orca Core2, together with the Orca app on the iPad (and the laptop and phone if need be). It’s an OK backup, but it doesn’t yet have the functionality of the real chartplotters. What is attractive is that you get charts worldwide, insofar as they have them. I’ll post a review at some point.

Lisbon

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 16:02:33 +0200

On the third day after Porto, Ella and I arrived in the bay that is also home to Lisbon. We spent the first afternoon and evening in the anchorage off Cascais. Ella had already been ashore there with her friends, so we had no “boat fever” driving us onto dry land. That’s when anchoring is truly wonderful: you drop the hook, check that it holds, and you’re done. No fenders to hang out, no lines to prepare, no docking manoeuvres, no harbour master to negotiate with about where and how, no bystanders sticking their noses in. None of that, just instant peace, and afterwards you still have the place to yourself.

Spanish Rías and Porto

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 18:07:45 +0200

Last week we left Sada in “the usual weather”, heading for the western rías (rivers, though low-lying fjords would be a better description). By the usual weather I mean the “Portuguese Northerly”, which blows strongest around the northwestern corner of Spain. Out at sea we got 25 knots of wind from the north to northeast. When that comes from behind or on the quarter it’s a perfect wind for Merrimac: the apparent wind over the deck is then only about 15 knots, and we go like a house on fire.

Brittany (France) and Sada (Spain)

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 16:30:03 +0200

The weather in Cherbourg was rather unsettled: frequent rain and a string of depressions marching up the Channel and over England. So when we got a weather window with relatively little wind, but from a direction that wasn’t entirely wrong, we left in a hurry. Marc and his crewmate had already gone on without Martine (who took the train) to the finish of the “Scheveningen 500” race and rally they had helped organise, namely Roscoff. We didn’t stop there. First, we weren’t taking part at all, and second, it seemed smart to me to round the western corner of Brittany straight away while there was no west in the wind. Wim and Mar on Pelagia had the same idea and had left at 04:00 (yes, four in the morning). I slept in until 6 and then set off as well, in drizzle and fog. Once outside the harbour it turned out you could sail quite nicely, hard on the wind. Fine by me. Later the wind kept freeing, and we got to sail a lot, in weather that was gradually becoming less drizzly and foggy too. Pelagia peeled off towards Brest, but we saw our chance to head for Loctudy.

Cadzand, Ostend and Cherbourg

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 17:52:57 +0200

We set off from Harlingen last Tuesday with a lovely NW wind. Around eight o’clock we reached the start of the Schulpengat, the channel between Den Helder and the North Sea. Oops, there was more of a sea running than we’d expected, so dinner was cut back to Freedom Soup left over from the 80 years of liberation celebrations in Milûk. Unfortunately that didn’t agree with Arnold, and he stayed a bit under the weather for the rest of the trip. By 8 the next morning we had almost passed Zeeland when the wind died. On to Cadzand, then. It’s a perfectly good marina where there’s always room for a visiting boat. The village itself is a typical holiday resort with lots of apartment blocks and a few touristy cafés and restaurants. Sadly, the good restaurants were on holiday themselves.

Lisbon, here we come!

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 17:10:58 +0200

Right, we (Arnold, Ella and Kees) are off on our summer holiday and/or leg one of the round-the-world voyage! Marion is looking after Miep, Arnold’s cat, but may well pop by at some point too.

This morning, out of the blue, two strainers for the water ballast were delivered, from two different suppliers. According to Kees’s Third Law, this means we now have a spare, so the first one will never break again.

The Big Departure

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 15:23:16 +0200

Right, finally half an hour to spare to post a quick update. The last few months have been hectic, working on the boat, first at KM in Makkum and then the last 3 weeks at home. The time has flown by. Steering freelancers, pushing and pulling. Explaining to painters what colour something is. Loading chain. Putting the entire interior back in – cushions, mattresses, stuff; everything except the tools had been sitting in the house.