Into the clear blue yonder: Viggo keenly joins others in the water for a dip.
Seven-year-old Viggo Mikkelsen Steele is back in action, bringing you the pulse-pounding excitement of his latest seafaring adventure.
Hello, it’s Viggo Mikkelsen Steele again. I am back with more tales from our incredible journey across the seas. Since I last wrote we’ve been to many more places.
One of my favourites was Cartagena in Spain where I made some new friends. On the day I arrived, it was Halloween. I dressed up as Harry Potter and my sister Alva dressed up as Elsa and with some other kids we went Trick or Treating to different boats and they gave us sweets.
Our new friends were called Amelia, who was ten-years-old, and Lorelai who was seven-years-old. Amelia made up something called Kids’ Club. That’s when we go to a shared building and play games. Sometimes my Mum took us to the playground. There were not many kids on the playground during the day but lots of kids came out at night. Spanish kids have dinner at about 8 o’clock and go to bed at midnight! At Kids’ Club, we also picked flowers to make perfume. One time we made a lemonade stand and we earned 6 Euros. I was happy then.
My grandma from Gisborne also came. We did a lot of sailing and she read us a story called “The Boy, the Boat and the Beast”. It was about a boy who woke up on an island and had to survive there for what felt like two years. I won’t tell you the ending but it was really exciting and I wanted to read more and more of it. My Danish grandparents also visited us. They rented a house where we slept in for two nights. It was really comfortable to sleep in a house because there was so much room.
Once we took the yacht into a cove to take shelter from a big storm. Even though we were close to the shore there were lots of waves because the wind was blowing so hard. We couldn’t go to the shore because our tender couldn’t get through the waves. We were anchored but the wind was so strong that it made the boat tip over. As a result, a cupboard opened, and some plates came out and smashed. That was the worst bit — I jumped up at the loud smash and I felt a bit scared. But in the end, the wind stopped. We went to the market and bought some new plates.
After Cartagena, we went sailing again to La Linea further down the coast in Spain and we saw heaps of dolphins and some whales. We caught a very big tuna and we gave lots of it to our friends. We have not caught any more tuna since then. But on one other sailing trip by Ibiza, we caught a swordfish that was bigger than Alva. It took a long time for us to eat all of it. My Dad broke off the sword and after boiling it in a pot we put it in a jar with alcohol and glued the lid down with melted wax so no air could get in. The jar is now on a shelf in my room.
When we were in La Linea, we walked across to England! It only took 20 minutes. Actually, it was Gibraltar, which is a tiny part of England at the edge of Spain. The English own it because 300 years ago there was a war between England and Spain, and England won because they dug tunnels under the rock so the Spanish couldn’t get them. In Gibraltar there were monkeys. We climbed up a steep hill and we saw some. My Mum said we couldn’t touch them as they might bite us. Some of them were fighting and one was curious so it jumped close to us. We ran back down the stairs.
We left Spain to sail to the Canary Islands. It took six days to reach our destination. When we got there we got to play with our friends from Cartagena. The Canary Islands is in the Atlantic Ocean where I had never been. On the trip we had to find ways to stop orcas from eating our rudder — lots of boats have been sunk or have been damaged because of orcas by Gibraltar. Luckily, we didn’t get bitten or sunk. We saw some orcas but they left us alone. It was hard to sit down for six days on a boat. I read lots of books on my Kindle and listened to audiobooks.
Now I’m going to have a break from the boat while my Dad sails across the Atlantic Ocean to Barbados. I’m excited to go to the Caribbean because the beaches are pink and the water is turquoise. In the meantime, we will be in Denmark where right now it is snowing and I will have a snowball fight with my cousins.
Thanks for joining me on our journey so far. I’ll be back with more stories soon. Stay tuned!