Unending islands
I spent my last full day in Tallinn provisioning the boat. I managed to find some paraffin – I had been chuffed that the 15 litres I had bought in Maldon had been the only fossil fuels needed to get me here, but I was now getting very low. I stocked up well on basic foodstuffs too: pasta, muesli, tins. Food is a great deal cheaper in Estonia than in Finland. As was beer, so I laid in a good stock of that too. I knew Jamie would appreciate a few bottles in the larder.
On the last day of May I woke early and went out to Tallinn airport to meet Jamie and Carrie off their flight. I was chafing at the bit to set off. The plan over the next three weeks was to cross back to Finland, and follow the coast back to the east and then north as far as we could go in the Bay of Bothnia. It was a long way to go, with some intricate navigation between the islands.
The forecast didn’t look too bad if we left immediately – with any luck we could be close to the Finnish coast by dark. So I’m afraid that all that Jamie and Carrie got to see of Tallinn was a rushed tour of the old town and a quick coffee in the main square.
As soon as we had cleared customs in Pirata we set sail, initially enjoying a pleasant breeze that brought us out of Tallinn bay, past the lighthouse 10 miles offshore, and across towards the oh-so-familiar Porkkala peninsula. We picked up the lighthouse that stands on its lonely rocky island off the coast, but by now the light was beginning to fade and a light misty rain had begun to fall. We couldn’t pick up the small spar buoys that mark the most direct route in towards the customs station we were aiming for, so decided to sail past the lighthouse and take a different route in, this one marked by leading lights in addition to the unlit spar buoys. By the time we reached the first channel marker the weather had deteriorated further. The wind had strengthened, was now blowing offshore so that we should have to tack in, and the rain was lashing down in torrents. Although we did manage to find the first two spar buoys marking the route, the rain completely obscured the leading lights we were meant to be following.
It was not a pleasant situation. We were tacking back and forth in the dark in a gathering storm, amongst shoals that would certainly wreck us if we should strike them in that weather. Reluctantly, knowing that just a couple of miles further on were beautiful sheltered anchorages amongst the islands, we decided it would be crazy to try and continue. Our first thought was to try and secure ourselves to one of the spar buoys – a manoeuvre that I think would be heavily frowned upon by the navigation authorities, but at least would keep us safe oevernight. But the spar buoys are just big slippery plastic poles and there is nothing to tie a rope to, and after several attempts to lassoo one we gave up. The safest thing to do was to head back out to a position near the lighthouse, where we knew there was plenty of deep water, and heave-to until morning.
We took down all sail except the mizzen, which when sheeted hard in kept us pointing slightly into the waves and prevented us drifting too far downwind. We lay there with the tiller lashed, occasional seas breaking over us, and I sent Jamie and Carrie below to get some rest while I crouched in the companionway out of the worst of the rain, rather cross with myself for having let us get into this situation, and a little put-out by the weather prophets too, who hadn't let on that anything of this sort was on the way.
At least Finnish summer nights are short. It can only have been three sodden hours after heaving-to that the sky to the north-east began to grey a little. We had only drifted a couple of miles in that time, as far as I could judge from the lighthouse and the couple of lit buoys that were visible through the curtains of rain. Looking at the chart, I realised that it would now be simpler to make our way to another buoyed channel 5 miles to the west of the route we had originally intended to take. It lead towards a small town with a pulp factory on the coast, and the channel was well marked with frequent lit beacons and large buoys – far easier to spot than the little spar buoys. What’s more the direction of this channel tended slightly to the west of north, and with luck that would mean we could sail in on one tack.
It was a very lumpy wet beat up to the first of the channel markers, but from there life became more pleasant. In fact as we sailed in the wind began to moderate and the rain eased. We made good speed, but it seemed to take forever to reach the inner islands where we could at last set the anchor and drop, exhausted, cold and sodden, into bed.
The Rules say that in crossing from Estonia to Finland you must stop nowhere between leaving the Estonian customs station and entering the Finnish one, and you must stick to designated channels as you approach the coast. Finding rest and shelter had become my priority though, so here we were anchored in a beautiful tree-lined bay miles from the nearest customs station – which wasn’t in any case the one we had written on our form that we were aiming for. We didn’t wake up until mid-way through the afternoon, and I decided that if you are going to break the Rules, you may as well do it properly. We stayed where we were the rest of the day, to recuperate and repair.
Most important of the repairs was to the new shroud I had made, the loop at the top of which was slightly too large and which had begun to slip off the hounds as a result. I improvised a bosuns chair, and Jamie hoisted me up the mast to see what could be done. An extra lashing to close the loop a little, and a groove cut in the hounds to stop the wire slipping off soon sorted the problem out.
Jamie started tackling the deck leaks which had made life so unpleasant below during the crossing. Deck leaks are in many ways more annoying than hull leaks, as water from the latter quietly runs into the bilges down the planking, while water from the former reaches the same destination via your head, sleeping bag, rucksack, bunk cushions and the contents of all the lockers.
It was remarkably hard to tell exactly where the source of our current leak was, except that it was somewhere about the foot of the mast. The forward end of the coachroof, the mast step itself (either inside or outside its metal socket), and the forehatch were all possible culprits. We stopped up some of the potentially leaky seams, but were soon to discover we hadn’t solved the problem.
We aimed to set off first thing the following morning for the customs station to confess our sins. But we had a slow start, partly because we hadn’t noticed that Jamies alarm clock was still on British Summer Time, and partly because there was no longer any wind. It was gone lunchtime by the time we tied up to the little wooden jetty and pressed the bell that summoned the customs officer from his modern glass lookout tower on the highest point f the island.
Not surprisingly, our chap soon wondered why it had taken us over 48 hours to sail the relatively short distance from Tallinn. When we explained what had happened, he had to get his supervisor down to check our story, and then he had to ring his supervisor, and then I was taken up to the control tower and sat down with a cup of coffee while the senior officer laboriously typed out a report with a single finger, turning to me to translate what he was writing and to check every minute detail. He was very nice about it though, and I enjoyed the view out over the countless islands from the tall tower.
Finally we were free to go, and I was escorted back to Teal. I had missed a moose that had quietly grazed near the waters edge while the others had lunch.
For the next few days we cruised gently along the coast in light winds. Often we were headed and had to tack our way through the islands and the rocks; on occasion the wind died completely. We weren’t making fast progress north, but it was very pleasant with the long sunny days to cruise so leisurely. The route we were taking was of course retracing my route along the south coast the previous year, firstly on my own and then with Rachel, but as often as not we were able to take different channels through the splatter of islands.
Soon we reached Hanko. I had hoped to get the remaining Finnish charts I needed here – the sets I had would only take me to the entrance of the Gulf of Bothnia. There were 3 further sets detailing the coast north from there, and as I hoped to avoid big towns up to that point I wanted to get the charts as soon as I could.
Unfortunately it was a Saturday when we arrived, and the only shop in town that sold charts had just shut when we got there. It wouldn’t reopen until Monday. It had just started to pour with rain, so we nipped into a cafe and ate pizza while we had a think. We decided to carry on towards Turku the following day. Turku was slightly out of my route, but it was the biggest town in the region and having stopped there with Hamish I already knew where the chart-shop was.
On the Sunday morning we woke to find that the waterfront had been turned into a market. I bought a new mantle for the Tilley lamp, - something not easily procured in the 21st Century - though at the moment the evenings were so light that we never needed it. Shortly before midday we set off, in company with a big Baltic trader that motored past us and disappeared into the haze. Visibility was poor, but oddly we were grateful that the channel we had to take was particularly narrow and twisty, as the navigation markers were closely spaced and we could generally see at least one marker ahead in the murk. Later it cleared and the wind picked up, and we made a very fast passage that day, anchoring just a few miles short of Turku.
We had taken a different route to the one I had taken with Hamish, and could go no further, for a low bridge blocked the way ahead. In the morning we put the canoe together and started paddling towards the town. In addition to our charts I wanted to get a tube of sikaflex – a rubbery goo that we hoped might help deal with the deck leaks that were still plagueing us. So we stopped at a boatyard just above the bridge to see if there was a chandlery there, or at least someone who might know where one was.
Arnold Schwartznegger greeted us as we tied the canoe up. Yes, there was a chandlery, it was about a mile away, but we could jump into his car if we liked. This was a bonus, it's not every day you get chauffeur-driven by a film star, or at least his twin brother. The doppelganger was a pilot who lived in Helsinki but had driven down on his day off to check on his boat and maybe go out for a spin if the weather looked nice. It didn’t, but at least he had the pleasure of taking us shopping instead.
The chandlery was in a modern shopping complex on the edge of town, and was full of shiny stainless steel gadgets and all the latest electronic gizmos. They had the next set of charts, but not the set for the very north of Bothnia. But they did have a tube of sikaflex – I guess even shiny plastic boats get the odd leak.
Arnie drove us back to the canoe. He was the only Finn we met who didn't look at as as though we were mad when we said we wanted to go north up Bothnia.
'The north is very pretty' he told us. 'But it is not like here - there are many, many rocks. And they are very, very sharp. Not many people go there.' From my observations even southern Finland was pretty well-endowed with rocks, few of which were of the soft spongy variety. It sounded like the north would be interesting.
We thanked him and paddled on into the city centre. I tried to find the bookshop where I had bought a set of charts with Hamish, but I couldn't remember which street it was on. Another bookshop had some charts, but not the set I needed. The shopkeeper agreed with Arnie. 'Not many people go there' she said. Eventually I found the original bookshop, but they didn't stock the northernmost charts either. 'We don't often get asked for them' I was told. 'Not many people go there'. I was losing hope, and the shop assistant wasn't particularly encouraging. ‘There is just one other bookshop’ she said doubtfully, and gave me directions. So I tried it, and lo! Buried under a pile of miscellaneous rubbish on the bottom shelf of the nautical section, was a single dusty set of the charts I needed.
I pored over the charts that evening. They looked somehow different to the other folios, and it wasn't just the romance of places that are little visited. It was a less recent edition than the other charts, and the slightly older typeface gave the charts an aura of mystery. The tiniest fraction of unevenness about the place names suggested that they had been prepared by a real draughtsman with pen, ink, and a set of stencils and a great deal of care and attention, not compiled automatically on a computer.
We left Turku in light winds, retracing our way in. Our route would have been shortened considerably if that bridge had only been a few feet higher. The evening light was beautiful, so Carrie and I took the canoe and paddled ahead of Teal to take some pictures. It's not often you get to see your own boat sailing.
The wind made up for its lacklustre performance the following day with a good blustery blow. Much of the day we spent tacking past high sided islands; we'd be creeping along solemnly in the lee one moment, the next leaning over joyously with gunwales bubbling and a satisfying trail of froth in our wake. We stopped at a little wooden jetty on an island for the night. A sauna and several big houses suggested some degree of civilisation, but though we wandered round we saw no-one. However, as we were getting ready to go in the morning a woman appeared from nowhere, relieved us of five euros for the nights stay, and zoomed off in a powerboat.
Although the evening and night had been calm, the wind blew up again as we left, making for hard work as we charged hither and thither through the archipelago. Around lunchtime we saw a pleasant anchorage, so stopped for lunch. It was so pleasant we decided to stay. Wisps of cloud were scudding across the sky, and although our little bay was perfectly sheltered we knew that if we stuck our nose outside again we would be in for more tough sailing. So instead we explored the little island we were anchored by, and then the neighbouring one, slightly bigger and sporting a beautiful little church with a graveyard filled with the scent and colour of a thousand flowers, a recent grave being tended by several members of the family as we wandered round.
Sitting by the shore relaxing before paddling back out to Teal we watched a beaver, beavering away quietly to himself around his little home in the reeds. I always thought beavers were shy and retiring, but this one bucked the trend. The nearest house was only 20 yards away, and the quay where the ferry disgorged its passengers was little further.
Jamie had another go at mending the deck leak in the evening, taking apart the pin rails and gunging them up with Sikaflex as he replaced them - sadly, with little effect. We had time to cook ourselves a grand feast for dinner. Pudding was tinned fruit with 'Suurmilk': like much of what we ate it wasn't entirely intentional, for the carton had looked much the same as any other milk carton when Carrie grabbed it in the supermarket. It wasn't what you would want to put in your tea though, being more like yoghurt than milk. I grew to quite like it - and they do say that the purpose of travelling is to experience different cultures.
We made similar mistakes several times on the trip. Cardamom flavoured bread made several unexpected guest appearances. I never did learn the Finnish for Cardamom so that I could avoid repeating the mistake.
We were now reaching the northern part of the mammoth archipelago that fills the triangle of sea between Hanko to the south-east, Aland in the west and the marvellously named Uusikaupunki in the north. As we travelled up the coast we began to catch glimpses of far-off open sea between the islands that lay on our port side, and gradually they became wider and more frequent, until we finally popped out into the Gulf of Bothnia. No land now lay between us and Sweden to our west, but a thin straggle of islands still lay along the Finnish coast and as often as not we took routes close inshore that took us along winding passages. Most of the leg up the coast we had the wind with us, although there were one or two stretches where the wind bent round islands and we had to put the odd tack in.
We decided on a night passage to get a few miles under our belts. As the evening drew on we were approaching the entrance channel to Rauma, a relatively large port with a scattering of islands lying off to the west. I was taking the watch while Jamie and Carrie slept, and soon realised that the little spar buoys that we were navigating by were becoming increasingly hard to pick up in the fading dusk. I turned Teal's bow offshore, and for a few hours we scudded along offshore in a stiffening wind, feeling the movement of the waves again beneath us. The night was short though – indeed now it was never truly dark – and as the north-eastern horizon brightened we headed in again for a narrow gap leading into another passage amongst the islands.
It was by now a lumpy sea, and in the half-light it was hard to pick up the leading marks we needed until we were quite close in – nerve-wracking moments as there were, as usual, several rocky shoals to avoid which could easily have wrecked the boat. The seas died rapidly however as we got into shelter, and after one short dog-leg in the channel that took us hard on the wind for a few minutes we found ourselves once again amidst the tree-lined islands in a serene, tranquil world quite at odds with the rumbustious waves offshore. Not that I took time to enjoy the scenery for long – I had already woken Jamie to help navigate as we closed the coast and I thankfully handed the boat over to him and Carrie and took myself below to catch up on sleep.
A couple of watches later I woke to find us going nowhere, sails barely stirring as we sat in a flat sea. I had intended to keep going up the coast for another night as we had a long way to go, but there was little point in trying to get anywhere in this wind. We were only five miles from Kristiinankaupunki, so we decided to head into port and restock with food.
It took nearly five hours to cover those five miles, and we had to row virtually all of that. Admittedly we didn’t row terribly hard, and we did stop and just drift for a while as we ate dinner. Eventually we drew up alongside an old timber-loading wharf where a big German motor cruiser was lying. The owner filmed us coming in and caught our lines for us. But it didn’t look too hospitable a place to lie, so we pushed off again and found a few pontoons further up beside a small hotel.
When we left, after a morning looking round the quiet little port with its inland lagoon; weathered, shingle-roofed church and enormous ugly power station, we found we were beating into a stiff breeze that raised a churning, frothy sea. It was an exciting sail, conditions that Teal revelled in as she lay over and powered to windward through the waves. But it was only on the border of remaining enjoyable – any more wind and it would have ceased to be. The seas that climbed aboard tested our attempts at sealing the leak in the foredeck, and gleefully pronounced them a dismal failure. The guitar, our sleeping bags and rucksacks were safe enough from the constant dribbles that ran from below the mast if we pushed them right up into the bows of the boat, but the bunk cushions weren't so easily dealt with. We took to spreading tea towels over them to soak up the worst of the water.
As we closed with the coast to go inside yet more islands the wind began to drop. I wasn’t looking forward to tacking between the narrow passages that lay ahead, when suddenly a hot blast of air resinous with the smell of pines struck us and the wind veered over 90 degrees to blow clean off the shore, turning the next few miles sailing into a delightful beam reach.
Another open stretch of water lay beyond the pattern of islands we were passing through. There were a couple of good sheltered anchorages we could make for though, and as it grew dark again late in the evening we tucked in behind the little island of Gashallan and dropped anchor to get some rest.
It was a beautiful place to stop. Everyone else clearly thought so too, for despite hardly seeing any other boats while we were at sea there were several other yachts alongside the tiny jetty. The island was approximately hourglass shaped, two rocky islets joined by a low narrow neck of land. On the northern islet a tall square building looked out over the sea, with outbuildings and a couple of cottages clustered about its foot. The Admiralty Pilot told us the island was once a pilot station, and the tall house their lookout. The southern islet had a slightly lower and more modern building, again with a couple of outbuildings, that seemed to be used as some sort of field station. None of the buildings were occupied at the moment though, so when the other boats all upped sticks and left in the morning we canoed ashore to find we had the whole place to ourselves.
On the landward side of the island the lush grass was mown in places, and there were stout wooden posts for drying fishing nets. On the seaward side it was bare and wild, left to the mewling gulls and terns and a simple cross commemorating a life lost offshore.
The wind had been howling when we woke up, so we had decided not to hurry but had got up in a very leisurely fashion to have our relaxed wander ashore. As we got back on board it was moderating, and by the time we left it was really rather calm. We sailed back down the entrance channel and made a futile attempt at tacking out to sea. After half an hour the wind had died completely, so we gave up, got the oars out, and paddled back to the island.
We made another determined attack on the foredeck leak. Jamie painstakingly scraped all the old sealant from around the base of the forehatch and carefully squidged a new bead of sikaflex round it, and I did the same with the forrad end of the coachroof. Then we collected some firewood and cooked ashore on a bonfire, and accompanied our little repast with a bottle of wine. Unfortunately it turned out we had made another shopping blunder, for Jamie and Carrie had picked the only bottle of wine they could find in the supermarket, not realising that alcohol in Finland is sold in special shops - the wine they had bought was alcohol free!
In the quiet of the evening a native paddled up to the island in a home-built kayak made from local pine. Jamie had recently built a strip-planked canoe with a couple of friends, using the same construction methods, so we admired his craft - which looked beautiful, golden wood gleaming in the sun.
As the evening darkened a gentle breeze stirred the reeds on shore again. I was rather keen to keep heading north, for I hoped to be in the very north of Bothnia when Jamie and Carrie had to leave, which was only a few days away now. So despite the late hour we made another attempt at leaving the island, which was nearly even less successful than the previous one as we touched on a rock as we left, the gloom and the sloppy waves conspiring to take us closer to the island than I had intended.
It poured with rain. Infuriatingly, the wetness on deck was still finding its way below from the foredeck. But the murky hours barely deserved the name night any more, and as the sun rose the skies cleared and we had a glorious sail up the coast.