Estonian Islands
In the morning we sailed back down the twisty, shallow channel, and had a pleasant and quick crossing to the little harbour of Sviby on Vormsi. Vormsi is quiet, with low-lying wildflower meadows and thick forest, and lots of old abandoned buildings. Curious, I trod down a route through the nettles to one old barn and peered through the windows to see an ancient workshop, seemingly not touched for 30 or 40 years but with old tools and fittings still lying abandoned on the benches.
We had the little harbour to ourselves – I couldn’t even find anyone to pay harbour dues to. The crossing had only taken a couple of hours, so we made use of the free time to do some work on the boat. Jodie took to the staysail with a sail needle, for a number of seams were beginning to give way. I drilled a drainage hole in the step for the mizzen mast, a job that had been on my list since I'd bought Teal and discovered that we would need to replace the heel of the mast because of rot caused by rainwater collecting in the mast step while she had been ashore in Alderney. I didn't want the fine new heel that Peter had grafted on to rot away in its turn, so in addition to the drainage hole I slapped in some bitumen mastic that looked evil enough to stop any rot dead in its tracks; indeed it looked almost viscious enough to dissolve the mast step away on its own accord.
The only flies in the ointment in Sviby were of the biting variety: the depleted population of the islands means that the local mosquitoes are ravenous with hunger, and are simply delighted to welcome any visiting yachtsmen that might decide to drop by to an evening feast. Dusk fell with a golden glow slowly melting from the western horizon, and soon the discordant droning swarms of a billion hungry mosquitoes drove us insane as they feasted on our exotic foreign skin.
We lit mosquito coils until we nearly choked ourselves on the pungent smoke, and we tried to stop up all available means of entry. Still they crept in through the tiny chinks in our armour. Regularly we would slaughter all we could, but there was a menacing revengeful cloud just outside the hatch waiting to replace their fallen comrades. Sleep is not easy when you hear the whine of a mosquitoes wings circling the cabin, knowing it is doing its best to find an unprotected inch of skin. I developed a technique of drawing the string of my sleeping bag around me so that only the tip of my nose lay outside to let me breathe, but the odd one still managed to find me. It was not the best nights sleep I’ve had, and poor Jodie was tormented worse than I was.
Winds were light when we left Sviby, tempting me to cut a corner over a shallow section. Suddenly, there was a ‘donk’ as the keel struck. Looking down through the clear water we could see a stony ridge beneath us, rising out of the sandy bottom. It appeared to be the only high spot in the vicinity – 10 yards to one side or the other and we would have missed it. After pushing off we sailed east a little way to avoid any more obstructions. I took a little more notice of the chart for the rest of the day, now that I had worked out what the Estonian chart symbol for 'little lumpy rock sticking up from the bottom' was.
The wind died further, and we sat in the sun and read, sails idling. The jellyfish pulsated by, overtaking us. Then a dark line appeared on the water in the far distance, and steadily approached. It was the wind we wanted; the sails grew bellies and drew us along past the jellyfish again. It only lasted for twenty minutes though, and then we had several more hours of calm. The jellyfish lazily, gloopily overtook us again.
Another squall, this time with rain and thunder; another calm. We had everything that day – winds from around the compass, strong sun, downpours, rainbows. Calm predominated though, so it turned into a long day at sea. Finally we tied up on a nice new pontoon behind the ferry terminal at Virtsu, back on the mainland.
The yachting scene in Estonia is not exactly kickin', but they are clearly trying hard to attract visitors. There are practically no natural harbours in the islands, so you have to rely on the occasional little quays that have been built as ferry terminals to serve the islands, or for loading timber. Virtsu was very typical of the places we stopped at in this part of Estonia. On one side of a little concrete jetty was a vehicle ramp and a dozen big tractor tyres lashed to the wall to serve as fenders for the ferry; on the other side, in this case behind another little breakwater to provide a smidgeon more shelter, was a couple of pontoons for visiting yachts. All the yacht berths are very new, no more than a couple of years old, and hardly any ever get used. Haapsalu, being the only town worthy of the name in the region, had sported a brand new marina, but even that was almost deserted - I could count the number of yachts I saw in the Estonian islands on one hand. I rather liked it that way, but it can’t be doing much for their economy.
We had to make another decision at Virtsu. It would be fun to sail further south, to visit the lonely island of Runo in the middle of the Gulf of Riga, once famous for its seal hunters, or we could even cross the whole Gulf and visit Latvia. The river Dvina, flowing into Riga, looked like an interesting place to spend a few days. Arthur Ransome had cruised it in Racundra, and his unfinished account of the trip was published recently.
On the other hand we could take things a bit more casually and just sail round the Estonian coast to Parnu. Or we could spend another couple of days in the islands, and then return to Finland for a while. It meant seeing less new places perhaps, but I could never tire of the Finnish islands, and it would make it easier for my remaining crew, as they had already booked flights to Finland.
If we wanted to continue south though, we would need more charts. I hadn’t appreciated that the coast round here was so thinly populated, and had assumed that one of the towns we stopped at would have a chandlery or bookshop that would sell charts. We hadn’t seen anywhere in Haapsalu however, and Sviby had turned out to be barely a hamlet. Virtsu looked bigger on the chart, so I had pinned my hopes on getting something here – my charts ran out a few miles further south so it was the last chance.
The ferry harbour is several miles from the town, so in the morning we walked in in the pouring rain. Then we walked out the other side before realising that the sprinkling of houses was in fact all there was to the place. We turned round. After some searching we did find a couple of tiny shops and were able to buy enough scraps of food to stop us starving, but a well-stocked chandlery or bookshop was clearly not on the cards. The only way to get charts would be to catch a bus to Parnu, the nearest city – but that would take a whole day. I decided I couldn’t be bothered, so that was our decision made. We would head north again.
Back at Teal we found another yacht had arrived in the harbour – quite an event. Not only that, but it was old, gaff rigged and flying a British Ensign. So we knocked on the side and said hello, and got invited in for a cup of tea. ‘Keepsake’ was not only another old wooden gaffer, but had also been built in Falmouth. She was a bit of a spring chicken in comparison to Teal though, for she had been built in 1930. Depite her youth, she was very pretty, sporting a very attractive canoe stern.
By the time we’d drained the last of Keepsake's teapot we discovered the day had nearly disappeared. It was gone 6, but the miserable heavy drizzle that had steadily soaked us all day was just clearing to a beautiful evening.
Heltermaa lay 20 miles away on the island of Hiumaa, so we decided to follow the ferries that left from the other side of our jetty and take an evening jaunt over in that direction. A good southwesterly breeze sped us across, and we tied up just after 11.
In the morning we headed north again. Our jumping off point for returning to Finland would be Lehtmaa, a tiny timber-loading port on the northern coast of the island of ????. It took us all day to get there, for at times we had very light winds. There was a surprising amount of chop in the shallow waters from earlier wind, and it knocked all the speed from the boat as we tried to beat into it. It wasn’t conditions that any boat would have liked, but being small and relatively heavy Teal suffered more than most.
Again we had to avoid shallows that were at times several miles offshore. We passed the Erik Stone, once painted red by Ransome's friend Captain Konga, although sadly I have to report that the paint has fallen off. The shallows are of course even shallower than when Racundra had passed this way, for the whole of this part of the world has been steadily rising since the heavy glaciers of the last ice age retreated to the north. With a draft rather deeper than Racundra's, we had to watch our course.
At least the shallows just to the south of Lehtmaa were easy to spot: a small coaster lay wrecked on them. As at the other islands, there were few signs of life at Lehtmaa. An enormous stack of logs lay behind the single concrete jetty, and in the distant forest a sawmill hummed. More interesting were the signs of the soviet occupation – a tall lookout post, fencing, abandoned military buildings with little narrow-gauge rail tracks that ran down to the sea, for what purpose we could not guess.
The mosquitoes here were the worst we ever experienced. As dusk fell the air became cloudy with a savage host, and the mad discordant hum of a million wings drove us berserk. Jodie used a handy book to massacre thousands, but it was pointless, for they came in their thousands to revenge their fallen comrades.
Despite being so small, Lethmaa is an official port of entry for Estonia - and for us, an official port of departure. The customs officer was to be found on a tiny launch that lay on the jetty, so we trotted along in the morning to fill in our forms. Then we were off, laying a course straight back across the Gulf of Finland to Hanko, which was the nearest port on the Finnish side.
It’s a considerably longer crossing than that between Helsinki and Tallinn, but we had strong winds to blow us across, and we were soon making '12 knots and a Chinaman'. We were enjoying the ride so much I left the big jib up rather too long. Some of the stiching had begun to disintegrate around the clew, where the sheets are attached. The strain on the remaining threads was too great, and suddenly one corner of the sail was floating quietly in the water, while the remainder flogged heavily in the wind. We put the smaller jib up instead, which was a far more sensible amount of sail given the increasing wind.
At Hanko we had to get our passports checked again, so our route was to the customs station rather than straight to the marina. Once again, this was in a hopeless place for a boat without an engine. There was a rocky entrance about a boatlength in width, then it widened out a little, but not enough to be able to tack through. That wasn’t a problem on the way in – the gutsy force 6 that had bowled us across the Gulf sent us shooting through the gap, as we quickly downed all sail. But even without any sail at all up we were flying very quickly towards the jetties. There were two- fortunately, for we found ourselves blown past the first one without time to get a line ashore. On the second I made a wild leap ashore to take a turn on a bollard and stop just before we rammed the customs launch that was tied up just ahead.
The customs officers here must have been bored – they insisted on a search, presumably to check we hadn’t exceeded our quota of cheap Estonian booze. In fact we had virtually none. It had certainly been my intention to stock up, but since Tallinn we had barely seen a shop worthy of the name, so we hadn’t got round to it. Down below was a pigsty. The rough crossing had tipped everything movable onto the floor; seeing as it couldn’t go any lower it had seemed easiest to leave it there. One of the officers gingerly crawled below, but the mess soon drove him back out again, and they cleared us.
Although we were free to go, there was absolutely no way we could beat out the narrow entrance in that wind. We asked the officers if they minded us staying the night there, but they had a better idea – they fired up their launch and gave us a tow out. We sailed the remaining half mile to the marina, and tied up there.