Homeward Bound
The ticking of time was calling Max. He had already begged an extra day away from his placement to come downriver with us, so he left us straight away to catch a train back to Helsinki. It would be just Brandon and I on board for the next fortnight, and my intention was to keep heading in an anticlockwise direction round the coast, and see some of the Swedish side of Bothnia. West of Kemi there is another great splattering of islands forming the Lulea archipelago, and weaving our way through those should be great fun.
We had the perennial problem of not having the right charts though. The excellent detailed Finnish folios we had bought in Turku ended pretty much bang on the border, which was only 15 miles west of Kemi. We tried all the likely shops in Kemi for the adjoining Swedish chart, but to no avail. We would have to stop in the twin border towns of Tornio and Haparanda and try our luck there.
We didn’t intend to rush though, so we spent the rest of the day and the following day catching up on sleep, doing our washing and relaxing. An elderly customs officer came to check up on us, asking lots of questions and checking our passports were in order. He offered to stamp them for us, and when he did so the stamp bore a date in 1992 - he had forgotten to set the date on it, and I suspect that that was the last time it had been used. I don’t think being a customs officer in the north of Bothnia is a very busy task in these days of European Unity. He was very chatty, admitting he only visited us to have an excuse to practice his English. We learnt from him that only 20 or 30 foreign boats made it as far north as this each year, mostly German. He couldn’t remember ever seeing a British yacht.
Then the paparazzi found us – a middle-aged lady from the local rag wanted to know what on earth we were doing in such a small boat all the way up there in the back end of nowhere. We merited a couple of columns. She posted the article to us later - in Finnish of course, so I haven’t a clue whether its a lyrical saga of our heroic adventures, or just one of those ‘’ere, have a giggle at these loonies’ stories used to fill up a bit of spare newsprint during a quiet week.
On the 28th Brandon and I set sail for Tornio in little wind but plenty of rain. We hadn't gone far before the wind suddenly picked up to a chunky force 5, driving us rapidly along the coast. The last bit of the channel to Tornio was too shallow for us, so about lunchtime we stopped at the port of Roytta at the mouth of the Torniojoki. Roytta was grotty. Three or four small commercial ships were tied up at the enormous steel foundry that dwarfed the port, and beyond was an old log pond with a narrow entrance that was marked as a marina on our chart. It turned out to be a few scabby half-sunken pontoons with a selection of tired old boats lashed alongside. The patch of wasteland ashore next to the derelict sawmill was littered with hulks that no longer floated. We found a space to tie up and went ashore after some lunch, but there was no-one there. We had to climb a high fence to get out, to hitch into Tornio to try and find the charts that we needed.
We tried the bookshops in Tornio first. One of them did have charts – but only Finnish ones. I bought a small scale chart of the whole of the north of Bothnia, as this would at least let us do offshore passages. For the intricate navigation amongst the Swedish islands we still needed something more detailed. Maybe Swedish charts could only be bought in Sweden said Brandon, so we walked across the bridge over the Torniojoki (noting its swift current, we were glad we had chosen to canoe the Kemijoki instead) and found ourselves in Haparanda. Haparanda is the smaller half of the border town, and does not have many shops. We looked for bookshops and chandleries, but there were neither. There was however a tourist office, so we went in and asked the young chap in charge if he could suggest anywhere to buy charts. He shook his head, then thought again. ‘Oh, there is a fishing shop, maybe you could try there’ he said. So we found it, on the next street, and they did indeed have charts. Phew – I don’t know what we would have done if they hadn’t. I bought two detailed charts for the next section of coast. When we got further south the good old stack of charts from Hatfield Peverel would cover most of the places we were likely to visit.
We started the long walk back to the boat, thumbs at the ready again. Fairly soon we had a lift – from the same chap who had picked us up on the way in! Oddly, he was now in a different car. But he spoke no English and we no Finnish so I haven’t a clue what he was up to. He took us to the junction just beyond where he had picked us up the first time, and it wasn't long before we had a second lift, our chauffeur this time a lady who worked as water clerk at the port.
In the morning it was blowing hard from the north. I didn't particularly want to head out in strong winds, but around midday it seemed to have eased a touch so we poked our heads outside. The shelter of the harbour had deluded us – it was wild. We scudded along downwind, looking for a cardinal mark we expected on our chart that should have only been a mile away. We never did find it, and had a scare when we touched the bottom briefly. It was crazy trying to get anywhere in that wind, so we turned round and beat back to the harbour. Later when I looked at the chart I noted the depths were measured in the 1960's. Given that the land is rising at around 1 cm a year here that could mean depths were significantly less than charted. Someone else told me later that northerly winds can reduce depths by another 20cm or so.
We had little need to go ashore again, so anchored out in the old log pond this time. I made a little mast coat from an old pair of jeans to cover the join between the mast heel and the steel socket it sat in on deck, in yet another attempt to reduce deck leaks further. It did help, and looked prettier than the steel socket into the bargain. Brandon repaired some woodwork around the cockpit area, and we even got a bit more of the interior paintwork done.
Around midnight we were brushing our teeth when a man appeared on shore, stark naked, and yelled something at us. We couldn’t make out what he said, but 10 minutes later a boat come out with a couple of blokes in, thankfully now fully dressed. It turned out they were inviting us for a sauna. We were planning to leave early in the morning, so decided not to, but we invited them on board for a wee dram. The little harbour was run by friends of theirs they said – it was a friendly place, and they didn’t charge much. But the big steelworks was expanding and wanted the land, and the lease would probably not be renewed. It was a shame – although we had thought it grotty and unpleasant when we had arrived, it certainly had character, and we had grown to like it.
The wind was a little lighter in the morning and we set off by an alternative route to avoid the shallow patch and the well-hidden cardinal mark. The sun came out and we had a very pleasant day meandering through the islands, although in the afternoon we were subjected to yet another Bothnian calm. I put the final coat of paint on the interior paintwork I had started the previous day, and in the evening we tacked very very slowly through a narrow boulder-strewn entrance to the harbour on Getskar.
Getskar had a small pontoon with a couple of other boats tied up, and a little log-fired sauna. It was already fired up, and Brandon and I tried it out, running down the sandy beach into the sea to cool off when the heat became too much for us. It was a warm evening with the water turned to gold by the low sun, so we brought the stove ashore and Brandon knocked up a couple of omelettes for dinner.
The wind had turned right round by the morning, but it was very light so we rowed out rather than tack again through the very narrow entrance. Soon a sea breeze set in, and the wind began to veer round to the south. We were making for Lulea, but again the fickle wind died in the evening and we had to settle for the island of Junkon instead, where a couple of breakwaters formed a shallow harbour, and a row of old fishing huts lined the shore.
An elderly couple on a big Halberg-Rassy moored in front of us invited us in for a glass of wine. Bosse and Eva were from Ornskoldsvik, further south on the Swedish coast, where the land is so steep-to that you never need a dinghy - you can always find a convenient sheer rock face to lie against. They hadn't brought a dinghy up here, and regretted it, for the shallower gradients meant they had to normally use harbours if they wanted to get ashore.
As it turned out, on Junkon even the harbour itself was a bit shallow in places - in the morning we ran aground on a sandy bank as we left. We pushed off with the oars and had a pleasant sail the last few miles to Lulea. Lulea would be the last town we would visit for a while, so we took the opportunity to replenish our stores.
Lulea was the wintering place of one Douglas Dixon and his wife, who set off from the river Roach (just 10 miles from the Blackwater) one calm day in the late 1930s to cruise through a Europe just about to be turned upside-down by the second world war. Their ship was ' Dusmarie', a Colchester smack a little larger than Teal, but just as simple.
They were a terribly English couple. They victualled their ship with a typewriter, fifty pounds of tea, and a plum pudding, leaving just enough space for their most important provisions, for in Douglas' opinion 'for sea and for the Arctic winter large supplies of Ovaltine are next to the blood of life'. In the saloon hung a portrait of the King, and a brace of rifles: neither were accoutrements I had bothered with in Teal.
When the Dixons got to Lulea they quizzed the harbour master on who had been that way before them, but 'neither Lindström or anyone else could tell of a yacht coming from south of the Quarkens under sail without an engine.... our ship was the first!'.
Well they may have been, and good on them. Will Teal have the honour of being the last? I do hope not, I hope for many centuries yet there will still be a sprinkling of misfits who don't do things the easy way. I don't expect the roll call of boats that Dusmarie heads will ever be lengthy though.
We decided to press on rather than stay the winter, so after an ice cream we left in the hot sun, back down the approach channel to the port, and branching off down a narrow channel to Germandofjarden. The narrowest point appeared like a man-made cut, and we were headed again. We rowed through as it was too narrow to sail, and there were evil-looking rocks poking out the water on both sides. Though it was only a couple of hundred yards it was very hard work in the wind.
Beyond, the channel widened into yet another sound between forested islands, and as the harsh afternoon light softened into evening we anchored off a wooded shore in a wind that was yet again dying away. It was a quiet spot, and we canoed ashore to liberate a small tree, for I had for a long time wanted to make a decent pole, or quant, for pushing off when we went aground. There were lumps of moose poo and hoofprints everywhere, but the beasts themselves were elusive. We found a dead straight young sapling which made a grand pole after we cut off the branches and stripped the bark. There were plenty of others – I doubt anyone will miss a little tree in Sweden.
Light winds continued to plague us as we continued south. We read and got odd jobs done as we pottered slowly along – it was great to have Brandon on board, as he never liked to be idle and was always mending or making something. Goodness knows there was a long enough list of jobs still to be done on the boat. We sailed through the following night as we had a long way to go, and plotted a course offshore as we didn’t have detailed charts of the next section of coast. By the morning we were nearly out of sight of land and had lost any landmarks that would tell us where we were. But as the coast swung round to the west again to meet our course we picked up the chimneys of Skellefetehamn, and aimed towards them. The unpredictable wind picked up as we closed the coast, and a lumpy sea built up. The best anchorage was beyond a group of islands lying west of the town, so we made our way in there, short-tacking to avoid a couple of unmarked patches of rocky shallows, and dropped anchor off a busy beach crowded with holiday makers.
The wind looked favourable for once in the morning, but we had barely upped anchor before it suddenly swung round to head us again. It stayed from ahead all day, despite our route taking us round several corners. Still, it was hot and sunny, and the wind wasn’t strong, so sailing was easy. Again we got odd jobs done as we sailed along. I took off a couple of bits of wooden trim around the cockpit that had been badly glued, and prepared to clamp and glue them back on. I did a dry run with the clamps, but we had to put in a tack before I could spread the glue and clamp it up for real. But why had we tacked through 130 degrees? Surely we couldn’t be pointing that badly? Aha - one of the clamps was right next to the compass, and the big lump of steel was baffling the compass needle. I took the clamps off and left the gluing to another day.
It was another overnight sail, and for a while the seas built up enough to turn Brandon green. At 3am I came on watch as the sun was rising, to find it once again dying away. For a few hours we were utterly becalmed - we were fated never to sail for long in Bothnia. We didn’t make the little old fishing harbour of Byviken on the island of Holmon until 6pm. The Swedish couple we had chatted to on Junkon were also moored in the harbour, having motored in a day the distance that had taken us four. They came over for a drink later in the evening, after we had wandered round the island and admired several beautiful traditional wooden boats and the old timber church.
A young boy on another boat in the harbour sold us a couple of fish he had just caught, and we ate them for breakfast. At the other side of the harbour was a wooden-boat museum, and I couldn’t come here with a builder of wooden boats and not visit. It was an excellent little museum, showing the various boats that the old seal-hunters who had lived on these islands used through the different seasons. They had little boats for fishing locally, bigger ones for the salmon fishing, boats to drag over the ice in the winter and big solid boats to live on in groups when they left on their annual seal-hunting expeditions.
For once the wind was kind when we left, and we had a dead run down to Holmsund, the port for the town of Umea. We had all the sails up - even the little dinghy spinnaker as a sort of mizzen staysail - and the headsails poled out to make them set as well as possible. Brandon was flying from Umea in the morning, and at one point we had been anxious whether we would make it or not with the light winds we had so often experienced. In the event we had plenty of time to spare, tying up in the big marina opposite the sawmill by mid-afternoon.