“Is this also sailing?” Suzana, our MBS boss, is really irritated. And she is right. After 2 ½ days of sailing on the open Baltic Sea, and being used to action, wind, rain or being sick this unknown kind of slow motion towards Gdansk feels like standing still. No wind, no sea sawing, nothing to do… just sun and unused amount of free time. The hole crew is irritated – what are we supposed to do? Just relax? Tak! But will we ever arrive in Gdansk???

Gdansk arising

Tak! Okay, it took us have a day from Hel to Gdansk, but we made it. After relaxed sunbathing on deck the dull crew wakes up bit by bit: with every port cran we ship by, with every port storage we see, with the historical dockyard of Gdansk we ship by. And then after endless industrial harbor site the old town arises. Our tour photographers Nadja runs around on deck, amazed, taking pictures non-stop.

The Lovis finally parks right in the middle of the old town. We cannot believe how perfect our ship is situated for the next days… and from the first minute people look interested at the ship and the posters. What a nice welcome! What a perfect start!

Eating bigos with the ghost of Napoleon

Jowita, Tomek and Marek, our Polish partners (Centrum Informacji i Edukacji Ekologicznej and Culture Collective/University of Gdansk), welcome us with a sailor barbeque in a real sailing place: Spichrzow Island. The owner Andrzej feeds us with polish sausage and bigos – meat finally! The dictatorship of the vegetarians is falling the more eastwards we go (only vegetarian food on board…). Happily, I am soaking in the greasy, delicious sausages…feeling a little bit sorry for our veggies, for missing the taste! Andrzej tell us proudly the story of his place in which we actually feel like being on board again, as the whole interior reminds of a sailing ship. But it is a bit more, it is history, Andrzej says: in the 17. century this place was the harbour storage for crop, later – when Napoleon pulled back from Moscow – it was a lazarette for soldiers. Napoleon, says Andrzej, made sure to visit his wounded men. Andrzej is pretty sure that his ghost is watching us eating bigos.