Petrolia goes to the Baltic (Blog)

[Petrolia]

Hopefully this works.
Sorry it's very amateurish.


http://petroliagoestothebaltic.blogspot.in/2014/04/petrolia-goes-to-baltic_20.html

 

[gjgm]

Is this 4 years.. blog says 2010 ?This is a real epic... Cor, can I borrow your boat !

 

[Petrolia]

That trip was in 2010. There was another trip in 2010 along and around Baltic Germany/Denmark.
2011 there were three trips:~ Kiel to Copenhagen, Copenhagen to Stockholm via Gota and around Stockholm archipelago.
2012 there were three trips:~ Stockholm to Helsinki, Helsinki to St Petersburg to Tallinn, then Tallinn to Riga.
2013 there were three trips:~ Riga to Kuressaare, Kuressaare to Gdansk via Lithuania & Gotland & Gdansk to Kiel

10 countries:~ Holland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland.

It has been pretty epic.
Worrying about it was mostly more scary than doing it !!
Most scary of all was going to Russia but it was fine.

 

[scubaman]

That's a pretty impressive trip!

Did part of that when delivering our boat from the UK to Finland back in 2007. We took a very similar route across Holland and the Frisian islands.

St. Petersburg must have been interesting. I've heard that there are good marinas.

Did you consider going up the Saimaa canal into the Lake Saimaa?

 

[Petrolia]

Didn't really consider Saimaa Canal. We were on a bit of a mission to pretty much circumnavigate the Baltic visiting main cities. Doing that we missed loads of nice places along the way but you can't do everything. Also Saimaa sounded more scary & bureaucratic than St Peterburg.

St Petersburg was a good visit. We had a week of brilliant weather. It's not as ancient as other european cities as they only really built it in 1713(ish) but interesting nevertheless. Diesel there was VERY cheap.

The main marina in St Peterburg that foreigners visit is fine but extremely noisy on weekends. Those Russians party HARD & loud till 5am. We were right out on the end of the pontoon as far from the beach bars as we could be and it was still banging !

Going to St Peterburg is actually quite easy if the paperwork is all arranged and the marina invite booked. There is a local guy who has been helping foreign sailors come to St Petes for years, decades even. He arranged the necessary paperwork from his end and we just applied for Russian visas for ourselves. He met us at customs and helped sort out all the form filling. The Russian immigration & customs officials actually just seemed very bored with it all. Main scary thing is you end up with a document saying you have temporarily imported your boat and it seems if you lose that document your boat stays in Russia !!

St Petes seemed perfectly safe to me. We wandered all over. Your more likely to get into trouble or robbed in Barcelona.