This + most photos of us by Daniel Stenholm, KSSS.

If you race offshore in the Baltic, Gotland Runt is a rite of passage. Like the Fastnet, the Bermuda Race or the Sydney–Hobart, it’s one of those races you have to do at some point, and everyone walks away with their own story.

I did my first one in 1991, on a tricked-out Sweden Yachts 38. I suppose that was also my first proper pro gig – Pär Lindforss and I were brought in to make the boat perform. We came second in class and the owner was delighted. Since then I’ve done it on just about everything, from an Albin Nova to a Swan 65 (I’ll admit I really enjoyed having my own cabin and a chef aboard).

And I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with the race. It’s not long enough to get you into the “600-mile bubble,” and the legs have felt too short to make any real strategic gains – yet still long enough to get boring. KSSS captured it pretty well in an article this year, What is the deal with Gotland Runt, really?, which calls offshore racing “perhaps the world’s most uncomfortable way to get completely exhausted.” The line that stuck with me, though, is the one that sums up doublehanded racing perfectly: “Onboard, the individual is erased. You become completely dependent on the person next to you making the right decision in the middle of the night while you yourself are asleep.”

But this year was different. Full on from the gun, with three genuinely challenging weather transitions to solve along the way.

For us, Peter Gustafsson and Mattias Bodlund, it was our first real offshore race with the J/99, and a good chance to find out whether all the preparation and the new sail inventory actually added up.

It turned out to be one of the most fun races we’ve done offshore.

Preparations and the start

We used our delivery from Gothenburg to Stockholm as preparation, sailing a lot of it in race mode – about 500 miles, non-stop, first with three aboard and then two-handed from Simrishamn. We tested the boat, our watch system, sleep, food. It made us feel genuinely well prepared, and it also shrank the mental size of the thing: 350 miles around Gotland feels a lot more manageable once you’ve just done a delivery like that.

These days I try not to look at the forecast too early. I used to study it days out, and the only thing it ever bought me was stress: first a few days of worrying it would blow too hard, then a few days of worrying it wouldn’t blow at all. An emotional rollercoaster with no upside. So now we’ve built a little tool that logs observations and compares them against the different weather models, which means we don’t miss the data – but I deliberately leave it alone until three or four days before a race. Then I look at what actually happened over the past week, which models seem to be tracking reality, and how the macro picture looks.

For this year’s Gotland Runt the macro picture was clear: a huge high had parked itself over a Europe that had been baking for a week, with record temperatures in Sweden too. The one thing trying to disturb it was a low over Iceland, but the high held its ground beautifully. In a flat high like that the isobars spread out, you get little wind, and – importantly – there are no stable low-pressure tracks to forecast against. Weather just forms. So the fundamental uncertainty was which models would be right: we had several running in parallel, and none of them quite agreed. That left three unanswered questions:

• Should we expect a sea breeze on the east side of Gotland?
• How easily would we be able to switch from offshore night tactics to daytime mode closer to shore?
• What would happen with the trough that had already hit Copenhagen and southern Sweden with record thunderstorms?

We’d been through this before. The year before, a similar system had threatened the start and Race Management made the right call to postpone – a front came through with +20 m/s in Sandhamn and total chaos. This year looked identical, so we expected delays. They came. The first postponement pushed the start two hours; the second, as the rain intensified and lightning lit the harbour, pushed it to 17:00. We sat on the boat watching the radar, adjusting mentally with each announcement. By 15:00 the trough had passed and the rain eased. The wind on the back of it was light and uncertain, but at least startable.

We motored out to the line, and at 17:00 we finally got to sail.

The start

The doublehanded fleet started first, 33 boats on the line, and because it was so soft everyone stayed close. It was a running start eastward from the new start line south of Sandhamn – a bit of a scramble, with maybe 60% taking the favored port gybe and the other 40% holding starboard for right of way.

We managed to thread our way through and find some clear space in a group of boats at the northern end of the line.

A few boats got away nicely: the XP-44 Xar from Skåne, big, fast, symmetric kite; a Whitbread 30; a couple of others with pace in the light. We came away okay, maybe sixth or seventh of 33 at the first gybe, which we were happy with.

The start isn’t the most important thing in a 350-mile race, but it’s still nice to be in it from the gun and not have to claw your way back.

Leg 1: Start → Svenska Högarna

Sun 28/06 17:00 → Sun 28/06 21:44 CET. Weather: Light to moderate southwest, 11 knots (6–13) and gradually backing after morning rain. No frontal weather yet, pressure flat around 1013–1014 hPa.

Photo: Christofer Haux, J/111 Elva.

After the opening run and a short jib reach, it turned into a long run north toward Svenska Högarna.

We ran a geometric S2 and did the leg generally well, passing a few boats and holding level with others.

This is where it became clear who we’d be fighting: right from here we were sitting very close to the J/11S Sleeper (the shorthanded version of the J/111), XP-33 Tärna, plus the usual Figaros and a few other very active Stockholm doublehanded boats we’d end up racing the whole way round.

We also had an early eye on the Pogo 36 Boxer – a boat that’s gone well for years and knows what it’s doing, but a lot faster than us.

Boxer pulled away in the freshening breeze and led on the water, Figaro 2 Amazigh second. We rounded Svenska Högarna in third, at 21:44 – just ahead of Tärna at 21:46. A little bad luck with the wind shifts right at the end didn’t go our way, but on corrected time we’d actually sailed the leg fastest in class, and led on handicap. Happy with that.

Photo: Juho Siipo, J/11S Sleeper.

Here are the times for this leg.

Leg 2: Svenska Högarna → Fårö

Sun 28/06 21:44 → Mon 29/06 11:35 CET. Long night leg. SW 10 knots veered gradually to NW (+90°) and died away in a dawn lull down to 4 knots near Gotska Sandön. Pressure crept upward (1014→1016) as the high took over.

Farr 400 Wetjob passing us to leeward.

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Passing JPK 1030 Tenet.

A long starboard leg down toward the north end of Gotland. We started out with jib, then code, then alternated jib and code as the wind came and went. Some boats had it easier than others: the XP-33 went well against us here because they had a narrower Code – a 65% half-width, which rates very well in SRS. We carry a 75% IRC code, technically bigger, but the shape isn’t optimal for the angles we had. Against the JPK and a few others, though, we did well and pulled away.

Being too close to Gotska Sandön cost Joyride, Tenet and a few other boats the race. Amazigh was quickest on the water through the dark. Tärna found a better lane and sailed past us early morning. They rounded Fårö third to our fourth, and won the leg on corrected time too, though we stayed close. Third on handicap now.

Leg 3: Fårö → Östergarn

Mon 29/06 11:35 → Mon 29/06 18:00 CET. West wind backed hard to SE and then SSW and collapsed to a 4-knot hole mid-leg before a new southern gradient filled in.

This was the first real transition, and our best leg of the race.

Coming in toward Fårö we could see on AIS that the boats ahead had suddenly slowed, with a lot of them tucking in tight to land and a few sitting completely stopped further out to sea. The rule of thumb, especially in daylight, is that you want to be in toward Gotland to catch any sea breeze, so we committed fairly hard to staying close to the coast – or at least staying right of the fleet and not drifting too far east.

Through a series of small transitions with bands of calm to punch through, the boats furthest west and closest to the coast were clearly the ones going best.

We also knew that down at Östergarn it might fill in from the southwest, so we badly wanted to stay right – to be among the first into the new wind.

Just north of Östergarn there was a very clear transition: everyone ahead had to tack to get through the sound inside Östergarn, while by the time we arrived, first Tärna and then we could hook straight into fresh breeze. I think managing that one transition well is a big reason we placed so high overall. On corrected time we sailed the leg fastest in class through the collapse; on the water Tärna still held us off and Boxer got punished hardest.

Leg 4: Östergarn → Hoburg

Mon 29/06 18:00 → Tue 30/06 01:07 CET. The passage — the turning point of the race. A trough passed during the evening: S 10 knots veered to NW and built toward 20 knots while pressure rose sharply (1016→1020).

On the far side of Östergarn it turned into a beat, and here we showed we had a small speed edge on Tärna. We caught them and passed, and were careful to stay right, because at some point the southwesterly would let us crack off toward Hoburg, and we absolutely wanted that shift before Tärna so we could use it to extend. So we had a proper tacking duel, tight in on land – we ducked them, they ducked us. Fantastic racing.

We got a little lucky and took the shift when we were furthest inshore, which bought us a couple of hundred metres.

Then a long leg south with code, very even with Tärna – sometimes a tenth or two to us, sometimes to them.

First 40 Almaviva passing us to leeward.

Another amazing sunset.

It lightened right up near Hoburg and turned into a beat that slowly built from 2–3 m/s to 7–8. It had gone dark by then, close to midnight, and this is where we discovered that the J/99 is a genuinely happy boat on this kind of beat. It felt great, and we pulled out a decent margin, which was fun.

The fast boats got paid in the fresh NW – Amazigh and Boxer quickest on the water, and Joyride actually won the leg on corrected time — but the thing that mattered was that we passed Tärna on the water at Hoburg (01:07 to their 01:15) and took third back. Second on handicap.

Looking back, we should have tacked in as soon as we had some decent breeze. You’ll quite often get lifted on starboard closer to land, and the Mumm 36 Shogun played that well. But we chose to stay with Tärna and consolidate our lead instead.

Leg 5: Hoburg → Visby

Tue 30/06 01:07 → Tue 30/06 08:04 CET. Post-frontal northwest. Steady W/NW 16 knots (12–20), steady direction and rising pressure toward 1022 hPa as the high-pressure ridge built – the hardest and most predictable weather of the race.

Here’s where I badly misjudged what came after Hoburg.

I’d run a bunch of routings and knew it would be a reach, and there was a debate about how good it would be. I had it up, but I never expected it to be that windy. So the plan had been to push hard to the rounding and then rest, eat, relax on the way up from Hoburg toward Visby. Instead we came round into 10 m/s at TWA 60–70; brutal, wet sailing where there was no resting and no eating, and we both had the feeling of, okay, we’re going to get soaked and stay soaked.

We talked about it: should we take a reef, go to the J3.5? Make it more comfortable? But the boat was flying. It felt like a great angle for us, just miserable, so we did another weather analysis, saw it would probably blow hard until around four in the morning, and decided to just grind it out – a couple of really overpowered hours before it would ease as we came up toward Stora Karlsö and bent in toward Visby.

Somewhere in there is the whole point of offshore sailing: there are stretches where you just want to quit, sell the boat and never touch the sea again, and this was one of them. Amazigh flew in the NW and won the leg. We held third on the water, stretched on Tärna and now moved ahead of them on corrected time too. Second into the return.

Leg 6: Visby → Almagrundet

Tue 30/06 08:04 → Wed 01/07 02:10 CET. Long light return. The high-pressure ridge suffocated the wind and it backed throughout the leg from W to SE (−133°) in just 4–11 knots. The decisive leg.

Exactly as forecast, the wind dropped as we came up on Visby. We could crack off – but our energy was completely gone, because the rest we’d planned simply hadn’t happened. We’d just gassed it the whole way. We looked at each other and wondered whether we had it in us. We got the code up, sailed in past the Visby buoy and started north.

Between Visby and Almagrundet we knew there’d be an interesting picture: the wind going from west to some flavour of southeast/east/northeast – something from a completely different direction – and obviously you badly want to nail that. It was also clear by now that the Figaro 2 Amazigh had gone brilliantly when it blew harder, so they were well ahead and leading the class comfortably. Our whole job on this leg was to close the gap to them intelligently.

For an hour or two we more or less just sailed straight around under Code while we worked to understand the weather, and we each got an hour’s sleep to be a bit sharper and think straight.

Then we went into attack mode.

It became a question of where and when that shift would happen. The routing looked very clear to me: at some point you’d cut a long way west to get the shift cleanly, then gybe and reach into Almagrundet in the new wind. We had one priority – minimise the distance to Amazigh – because we knew that if we could get within range and sail roughly the same weather as them, we had a good chance on corrected time.

Tärna was maybe an hour behind us, which felt reasonably safe. And, like every transition, we didn’t want to do this one half-heartedly. To get full value from a routing or a shift you have to commit fairly hard. There’s a version where you just sit on the rhumb line and take whatever weather you’re given, and a version where you’ve got a clear idea and commit to the corner. The common mistake is landing somewhere in between: not quite trusting the routing, not quite trusting the model, so you end up between the rhumb line and the optimal – which is often the worst of both. It feels safe, but it’s neither the shortest way nor of any real use in the weather.

We found several models that all said roughly the same thing, and settled on two we trusted – the Finnish one and a Nordic model. Both pointed the same way, and in hindsight we sailed almost exactly on those routing lines. When it lines up that well it’s extra satisfying. We chose not to go quite as far west as the routing wanted – that probably would have been faster to the finish – but our strategy was Amazigh and the gap to them, so we took maybe 80% out to the corner and then aimed hard at them. By the end of that manoeuvre we’d gone from 10–12 miles behind to 5–6, and it felt like we were now inside an hour, which would beat them on corrected time.

Nice to hear afterward from Odd Lindqvist and Roger Nilsson – both of whom have sailed Gotland Runt more times than anyone can count – that from the outside it was obvious we’d committed to a strategy and executed it. Getting that feedback from two legends was a real kick.

From there to Almagrundet the wind was all over the place; code and A3 at TWA 90/100/110, shifting constantly – so it was a running question of whether to let the pilot steer to compass and re-trim continually, or steer to wind angle so we could rest a little while the boat wandered ten degrees high and low. We tried both and found something that worked.

On corrected time we won this leg by 24 minutes over Tärna and more than an hour over Amazigh, and took the class lead on handicap. I’m super proud of the team for staying 100% focused this late in the race, after the grueling stage up to Visby.

Leg 7: Almagrundet → Finish

Wed 01/07 02:10 → Wed 01/07 05:13 CET. Final stretch into Sandhamn in light southeast, 5 knots (3–7). A short, nervous finish leg.

As everyone who’s sailed Gotland Runt knows, the thing is very often decided between Almagrundet and the finish, and it’s fatally easy to arrive at Alma and think the job’s done.

For us it was a genuine nail-biter.

The wind shifted a lot and, worse, it lightened right off.

We had good boatspeed most of the way, but 300–400 metres from the line – after the whole pack ahead had already finished – the wind basically died.

We were doing about a knot, sitting there with the KSSS photo boat, the clock running, and what had looked like a safe class win a hundred metres earlier suddenly felt thrown away.

But there was just enough breeze to creep across.

We knew Amazigh was about an hour ahead on the water and that we’d taken them on corrected time, and on AIS we could see Tärna five miles back – they had to give us about 20 minutes and wouldn’t make it. So it felt reasonably safe.

But as always, you don’t actually know until the results are up and every boat is in. So we waited.

Results

First in Double Handed (SRS) and first cruiser/racer in SRS.

Huge thanks to KSSS and everyone who organised, and to everyone who followed along. And thanks to those who make it possible: B&G, Happy Yachting, Henri Lloyd, J/Boats, J/Composites, North Sails, Liros and Spinlock.

Our class position on corrected time, mark by mark: 1st at Svenska Högarna, 3rd at Fårö, 2nd at Östergarn, 2nd at Hoburg, 2nd at Visby, 1st at Almagrundet, 1st at the finish. A race with two faces – two faster boats (Amazigh, Boxer) led on the water almost the whole way while Tärna and BLUR traded blows again and again- and it came down to the long, light return, where the light air suited us and we could finally make it stick.

Gap to the class leader – the whole fleet

The story is in the shape. BLUR led out of the opening leg, then paid for the light dawn passage to Fårö and slipped to 17 minutes behind Tärna — the only real dip of the race. From the east coast of Gotland onward the line climbs back toward zero, and at Almagrundet BLUR and Tärna finally swap for good. The two genuinely fast boats, Joyride and Boxer, run away toward the bottom: quick on the water, but never able to save their rating in the light.

Blur vs Tärna – the match within the race

For four marks Tärna had us – never by much, a couple of minutes at Hoburg – but they were in front. We lost them at Gotska Sandön but then reeled them in. Equal at Hoburgen, 32 minutes ahead at Visby, 56 at Almagrundet after the routing paid off, and 33 minutes at the finish.

What we learned – and tips for next time

On the weather models. The regional, higher-resolution models earned their keep. FMI HARMONIE and MET Nordic were consistently the best on the legs that mattered, often 1–3 knots and several degrees closer to reality than the global models. In light air below about 4 knots, resolution is everything. Two caveats we’d write on the bulkhead: no model caught the light hole on the east coast of Gotland — there, local knowledge beat every GRIB – and the models systematically under-read the wind, so in open water it’s worth mentally adding a couple of knots. Run several models in parallel to see the spread, and get comfortable sailing under uncertainty. It’s the messy, shifty, transitional stuff – “this is going to get really tricky up here at Östergarn, good” – where we tend to make our gains.

If I had to put my finger on the three things that made us sail well, it’d be these.

One: we always drive the boat hard. 

Doublehanded you’ve got less muscle aboard and have to do more with fewer people – but a lot of things also get simpler with two. It’s completely clear who’s responsible for sailing the boat, and usually there’s one person on deck sailing it actively with no doubt that that’s their only job. We’ve moved away from rigid two-on/two-off toward something much more dynamic – the way a lot of the French sail. Rather than watching the clock, we talk constantly about how much rest we need and how much is left in the tank. Sometimes it’s I sleep two, Mattias sleeps two; sometimes we both push hard on deck for four hours and only then start trading sleep, whether that’s 2+2 or 1+1 to keep it fair. We have different needs – Mattias often needs a bit more sleep, and I can run a long time on very little- but you have to be careful not to drive yourself into the wall entirely. And we protect time together: breakfast, lunch, dinner where we can, because that’s when the tactical conversations happen.

Two: we’re offensive with routing and shifts. 

We’re always trying to identify the zones where the race will actually be decided, and we want a distinct strategy for them. It isn’t about taking a lot of risk – we’ve got a quick boat and don’t need anything spectacular – it’s about being on the right side when things happen and not getting stuck in a hole. Commit to the analysis and sail it cleanly. The half-committed middle ground is usually the slowest place to be.

Three: sail inventory. 

None of this is new, but anyone who’s built a wardrobe knows it’s a pile of compromises – which jibs, which downwind sails, staysail or not, where each sail’s sweet spot is, and where the crossovers fall. The J/111 had a few sharp peaks where, with the right kite and angle, it would just take off. The J/99 is rounder and duller in the polar; I can rarely bear away ten degrees for a big gain, so we wanted a wardrobe that plays to that. We think we got the overlaps right – at 5 m/s and TWA 80 the jib works, the Code works, and it’s fine to sit with those sails without swapping – which meant we weren’t constantly changing to keep the boat in the groove. Also, we’re able to sail most angles without compromising performance, which makes routing easier. Between the French wardrobe the boat came with and the winter’s work with North Sails, especially on the downwind inventory, we pretty much nailed it in the conditions we had. I’ll write a separate piece on this later.

The last thing worth saying: the reason we sail well here is the fleet.

The Stockholm east-coast doublehanded scene is genuinely active, with a number of boats sailed at a very high level – people who know their boats, keep them tidy, have sailed together for years and done Gotland Runt many times over. Getting to benchmark yourself against them is fantastic.

Beating them is even better.