Visby to Kiel
Visby was a jewel. Like Tallinn, it was once a prosperous mediaeval trading centre, now cashing in on the tourism opportunities a heap of old ruins present. The merchants must have been very holy in Visby - there are an astonishing number of crumbling churches. The afternoon was happily spent wandering round the ruins, which in some cases had little stone staircases and passages within the walls to explore, or dark damp crypts. Our wanderings also took us through lush gardens, exploding in colour, and up to the ruinious city wall, which we sat on to enjoy the marvellous view over the grey stone of the churches, the red roof tiles and the twinkling blue sea.
In the cathedral church of St Mary - one of the few churches that aren't ruined - we found a concert underway. A choir were singing a programme of sacred music that soared in the cool wide space and rang back from the heavy stone walls. It was music to make your skin tingle and tie your stomach in knots, and it seemed surreal to be sitting at the back letting the ethereal rich sound wash through us – a spiritual world entirely at contrast with the physical hardships and pleasures of sailing a small boat overnight through open seas.
I would have liked to remain in Visby for a while, for it was a beautiful and fascinating place. In a few days the big annual mediaevel festival was due to begin, which by all accounts is fantastic fun. But the long haul down the Swedish coast beckoned, and although the marina was handy, the berth we had wasn't particularly comfortable and it was the most expensive place we moored in the whole trip. We needed to keep heading south, and already the wind had turned against us again, although the forecast for the next day was at least for fairly light winds.
We had a choice now, for we could either lay a course offshore and stay east of the long thin island of Oland, or head inside through the narrows at Kalmar, the way we had come the previous year. The outer route had very few harbours or refuges of any kind, so we opted for the inner route despite the more intricate navigation needed. It was a slow passage. Winds were initially light, picked up for a while overnight and then died completely – but whatever their strength, they were always from ahead. It was 36 hours after leaving that we sailed into the tiny old fishing harbour of Sandvik on the western coast of Oland. Although it is mostly given over to yachts now, there were still a couple of open fishing boats tied up by the quay, and ashore a stall was selling their catches. We bought some smoked fish, of what species I cannot now recall if we ever identified it in the first place, and found a table on the pierhead to enjoy dinner. Later we walked round the village, which sported an enormous and preposterously ornate windmill, but little else.
During the night a strengthening wind sent a little swell through the narrow harbour entrance to bob us gently to sleep. Tacking out the narrow gap between the high, solid pierheads was nerve-wracking, but we hit nothing and were soon continuing south towards the narrows. Most of the day we had a good force 6, right on the noggin, which made for a cold wet passage with lots of spray coming aboard.
At least Teal got her head down and got on with it though - I had definitely got the right boat for this kind of work. Having said that, it has to be grudgingly admitted that 90 years of evolution has produced some boats that do go to windward even better than Teal. As we approached the imposing square castle at Borgholm in the evening light a big Halberg-Rassy flying a blue British ensign came powering by and rapidly overtook us. We waved to the couple crewing, for they had been berthed near us at Visby. They went into the marina at Borgholm, but we decided to carry on to Kalmar. It grew pitch dark as we approached the twisting channel that leads under the bridge that crosses the sound, where the merry flashing sectored lights turned the water into a fairground. A shooting star seared the heavens as we neared the bridge, and we berthed in the marina at 2 in the morning.
We spent the following day in port, catching up with sleep, buying a detailed chart of the islands around Karlskrona, which we hoped to visit, and shopping. Quiver, the big Halberg-Rassy we had seen, had also arrived in the marina by the time we woke up, and Anthony and Monique invited us on board for drinks in the evening. The boat was very new - this was their first cruise in her, apart from a short shakedown on the west coast of Sweden near the Halberg-Rassy yard, and they had been up as far as the Aland islands and Turku. She was sleek and shiny, with all mod cons. There was an unimaginable amount of space – her internal volume must have been ten times that of Teal. There were another seven guests there: a French couple from the boat berthed alongside, and a family of five from another British yacht. Yet we all fitted round the big open cockpit while we chatted and ate and drank. It was interesting to talk to the Robson family, who had sailed up from Copenhagen. Though Picaroon was plastic, a sensible family boat, they had once been wooden boat idealists too, and for a while had owned the historic gaff cutter Moonraker. As it happened, Anthony and Monique had a copy of the book that Moonraker's previous owner, the well-known sailing author Peter Pye, had written about his own voyage to the Baltic.
I tracked down a second-hand copy of A Sail in a Forest when I returned to the UK.
I was mildly anxious about the next stage of the voyage, for in sailing this section of the coast last year we had had strong south-westerlies, and if we had the same conditions they would be blowing in our teeth rather than the relative comfort of our nether regions, and it would not be comfortable. There were plenty signs of being further south now. Jellyfish pulsated gloopily in the warmer waters, we began to hear the sound of crickets in the evenings, and, bizarrely, there were even a couple of palm trees in Kalmar. But the latitude was conspiring with the drawing on of the season to rid us of balmy summer evenings of soft light and sunsets, and give us increasing periods of dark and cold.
I suppose to make good use of the light we should have started at 5 in the morning, but we fancied a good nights sleep too much. Most boats had already left the marina by the time we had breakfasted and slipped our lines. Both Quiver and Picaroon, had vanished, so we followed the late risers that were heading south through the last of the Kalmar narrows, and into the widening southern half of the sound.
The wind stayed south-westerly all day, blustery at times, and on a sunny day with the twinkling waves and an azure sky it was a fun sail. The winds were forecast to turn slightly more easterly the next day, so we kept to the Oland side of the sound to make the best use of the change, and ended the day in another little island harbour, Gronhogen, near the southern tip of the island, tied up behind a couple of big old Baltic trading ketches.
So much for the forecast. We awoke to dead calm and strong sun, and after rowing out the harbour sat lifeless off the breakwater for a full two hours. Occasionally the tiniest zephyr would allow us to gain a few yards offshore, but the waves were very slowly but surely pushing us back, and occasionally we had to get the oars out to keep us away from the rocks. Finally a gentle breeze did start up, but there wasn't even a hint of easterly in it - it filled in from our least favourite direction, the south-west. Once again we spent the entire day tacking.
We only had a short distance to go before we could nip inside the islands around Karlskrona. The channel to follow in was narrow and beset on either side with shoals, and I intended to get there early enough to follow it in daylight. But the calm and then the contrary winds made us very slow, so that it was gone dusk by the time we picked up the first set of markers, and it was rapidly getting darker. Ironically, the wind was now picking up.
At least there were leading lights to follow, so I decided we would still try the inshore channel as it seemed a better option than pressing on in an increasing wind to windward around a very exposed headland. A bloody scimitar of moon rose above the horizon, and two shooting stars and a satellite passed overhead as we lined up the first pair of marks along a course that was very close-hauled. Mercifully we could just steer it, for tacking along that channel would have been almost impossible. The buoys that were laid in addition to the leading marks were unlit, but the reflective tape with which they were marked showed up in a torch beam a few seconds before they slid by – hopefully just enough time to avoid them or move to the correct side of them if we proved to be off course. The passage they marked was only a couple of boatlengths wide.
The channel turned a dogleg, and now we were following a pair of leading lights that were behind us. That made avoiding the buoys even trickier, for I was steering looking backwards, concentrating hard to keep the lights in line, and had to rely on Jojo and Toria to yelp in time when they saw another buoy loom suddenly out the inky blackness. The change in course meant we were further off the wind now, which was something of a relief but also meant we were careering along a lot faster, with rocks waiting to catch us if we strayed from the right line. We dropped the main to slow us, but when we reached the next corner I decided that enough was enough and swung her into the wind, and we lobbed the anchor over. We were well in among the islands now so there was little sea and enough shelter, but we were rather near the middle of the channel if any other boats should come by in the night. I decided it was unlikely that anyone would be that crazy though, and anchoring was a better risk than playing blind mans buff around the rocks.
We tried to set an riding light, but the little paraffin hurricane lamps I had used before blew out in the rising wind. A candle in a glass jar with a couple of small holes in the lid fared better, but I suspect it too only lasted a couple of hours before the wind got the better of it.
No fishing boats ran us down though, and it was a pretty scene when we awoke in the morning. The sprinkling of islands was not dissimilar to the Stockholm archipelago, though somewhat less wild and more densely populated. We had only just hauled up the anchor and started tacking (for the wind had swung round to the north-west which was – guess what – the direction we were now heading) when Picaroon motored up, circled us once while we chatted, and motored on again.
Not much further on we spied a big gaff ketch ahead of us. Seeing other gaffers was so rare in the Baltic that it always got us excited, and we were pleased to see how rapidly we were overhauling it. It seemed by be crewed by a big crowd of young people, and a couple of lads were fooling about in a spritsail dinghy that was running rings round her mother like a little duckling. The skipper was curious to know about us as we slid slowly by, and told us his big lumbering craft was a replica of an 18th century trading boat that used to ply between Karlskrona and the German coast.
Later we anchored off a pretty island to have a run ashore, and they came past us again, under motor this time. It was good to be in amongst islands again. There were many more deciduous trees here compared to the northern islands, mainly oak, and the scenery was generally more open, though the rounded granite rocks were very similar.
On leaving, our course lay under a bridge. Yet again, it lay dead to windward, needing some very short tacking on the approach. The wind was gusty, and on one tack there was a loud ping as a running backstay - one of the wires which keeps the mast upright - parted. We immediately tacked to put the strain on the other backstay, and ran back to the anchorage to sort ourselves out. It turned out to be only a shackle coming undone so was easily repaired, but we stayed for lunch to calm our nerves before setting off again.
Rain was setting in as we sailed past Karlskrona on its promontory, and settled to a steady drizzle as we continued beating towards the bridge that crosses the narrow gap between Hasslo and the mainland. We again overhauled the big ketch, which was gamely tacking that way too. We could point a good 15 degrees higher than she could, and were impressed that she still kept sailing despite all the hard work that it entailed – most Bermudan boats with vastly superior performance would be motoring in those conditions.
The bridge, when we finally reached it, turned out to be a formidable obstacle. It was a lifting bridge, with a very narrow passage, too narrow to sail through. However, rowing was impossible into the rising winds, even with Jojo's muscles, and there was no safe place to put someone ashore to pull us through. Even if we made it through there was a nasty chop coming in the other side and setting off dead into wind and sea might well have been impossible. At the very least it was extremely dangerous.
In any case the bridge wasn’t manned – the pilot book claimed it was monitored remotely by TV from Karlskrona, but we got no response to our shouting and waving. I decided it was better to anchor behind the nearby headland instead, go for a recce ashore to work out a plan for getting through, and try again in the morning.
Jojo and I got the canoe out a couple of hours later and paddled ashore in the continuing drizzle. Standing on top of the bridge we were very glad we hadn’t attempted it, for what we hadn’t appreciated from the water was the strength of the current that was setting through the tiny gap - it must have been two or three knots. There was no way we could have got through safely without an engine.
In the morning we looked for an alternative route. There was a shallow, narrow passage round the eastern side of Hasslo - the bridge lay to the west - but with care it should be passable, so we set off to the east. A little fishing harbour was marked beyond the shallowest section, which took us over a submarine barrier that could be raised to prevent passage in times of war, for Karlskrona has for hundreds of years been a big naval station. I decided we should stop to try to get a forecast, for the weather looked distinctly unsettled, the visibility deteriorating, and the next section of coast was quite exposed with few refuges. The last forecast we had got was in Kalmar, a few days ago.
We tied up immediately inside the pierheads, which were barely a boatlength apart. A group of fishermen had watched us heave-to off the entrance to get ropes and fenders ready, and they came trotting along the breakwater to catch our warps. ‘Ah... we don’t see many gaff sails like that any more’ one of them told me. ‘My father, he watched you sail by from his house along the shore there – he fished from boats with sails like that’.
I asked him about the weather. He chuckled. ‘They say it will reach 22 metres per second offshore tomorrow. You might want to put out some extra lines!' After the North Sea saga I had sworn not to put to sea in a gale again. I asked if we could stay for a day or two. ‘Yes, you are very welcome. There is no charge – there are showers and toilets over the far side, and if you need anything we’ll be on one of the fishing boats.’
We found a cafe with internet access a mile away, and the forecast was indeed for strong winds – although the worst would be to the south of us, where the weather prophets were foretelling a chunky force 10. To pass the time we caught a bus to Karlskrona, now 16 miles behind us. We walked round in the rain, looked round the maritime museum and enjoyed the solid old buildings of the naval dockyard and the historic city centre.
Back on Hasslo the rain slowly eased. The cafe we had visited earlier advertised an all-you-can-eat pizza buffet for 69 kroner, so we retired there in the evening. Jojo and I are naturally competitive. Only a couple of pizzas were put out to begin with, and they didn’t last long. Jojo took the last slice of aspasagus, beef and hollandaise sauce to take an early lead of 4 slices to my 3. But some more flavours soon arrived. I gradually caught up as we ploughed through the ham and pineapple, and a delicious offering of feta cheese, sun-dried tomato and olives. Taking the rating up over the last couple of slices, I swallowed the last mouthful of my 10th slice just a second or two before Jojo.
I felt fairly full already, and we took a short pause. I decided to aim for a target of 15, but Jojo pointed out that 16 was a rounder number, for it totalled two whole pizzas each. Approaching 14 slices each, with swelling bellies we downed the last slices of feta and olive. Another pause before tackling the final straight. Jojo rose to collect our penultimate course. Only two options were available, so he brought back a helping each of the unusual kebab-meat topped pizza, leaving a second helping of the prawns for the glorious finale. My stomach felt like lead, but at least the oily kebab meat was well greased to help it slide down.
I didn’t want to do anything but sit in a stupor and slowly let my aching crop digest its doughy load. But, groaning, I hauled myself from my chair and staggered through to where the pizzas were laid out to collect the prawns. Oh horror! For since Jojo had visited two new pizzas had been brought out! How could we leave if there was a virgin pizza lying there lonely, spurned and untasted?? There was nothing for it but to bring back not one, but two more slices for each of us. The prawns we had already had a slice of, so they could stay, but I loaded up with the peppers, and the chicken and mushroom.
My two slices sat there on the plate glaring balefully at me. I burped. There was nothing for it but to get them down quickly and hope for the best. Somehow there was space, my stomach extended like a barrage balloon. It wasn’t really a draw though, I told Jojo, for he hadn’t eaten his olives - in fact, I had eaten them for him. Wouldn't do to see them wasted. So two of his slices didn’t really count – I was the winner. . He sat there indifferently for a minute or two. Then, he got up, walked through to the servery, and came back with not one, but two more slices of pizza. I was utterly stunned. I knew my grossly overloaded digestive system was as full as it could be. There was simply no way I could force another thing down without inviting a nasty accident. But for Jojo... those two slices just slipped down, and he sat there replete and self-satisfied. 19 slices! There must be some society that gives medals for achievements like that.
‘19 slices – well, ok then. You win’ I grudgingly admitted. ‘But it’s not a very round number – surely 20 would be a more satisfying total?’ He didn’t look convinced. ‘Anyway, you must weigh about 15 % more than me, so if we weight-adjust the figures, I think you’ll find that I’m still the champion’. That did it. Up and away to the serving table he sped, and brought back the 20th slice. One more slice was ground down mercilessly by those fine teutonic molars and joined its fellows in that bottomless pit.
I had noticed something though. It was a slightly crumbly slice, and the point of the triangle (le nez as the french would say) had fallen off as Jojo had helped himself. ‘I’ll go back and get it for you’ I offered. ‘You know it doesn’t really count unless you eat the whole slice.’ So I went back with his plate and picked up the morsel he had missed. Then – purely out of scientific curiosity you understand - I put another slice of the kebab pizza on his plate too. Just to see what would happen.
Well, down went the mouthful he had missed earlier. I tried a tiny bite of the kebab meat, and felt very very ill. But Jojo wolfed it down with every appearance of relish. ‘But I think zat vill do me’ he said. ‘You are a schwein’ I said, though secretly I was impressed, and jealous. Is 21 slices (minus a tiny nibble and a handful of olives) a Swedish, or even European record I wonder? I should say that Toria took a very credible third place with 13 slices. Not bad for a girl.
A little while later we staggered back to the boat. I did not feel well. An enormous belch escaped from me as we reached the harbour, flavoured with prawns and peppers and olives and chicken and ham and sun-dried tomatoes... and kebab meat.
‘That's the most sensible thing you’ve said all day’ said Jojo.
The trusty Baby Blake saw heavy use over the next couple of days. Neither Jojo or Toria were complimentary about the sanitary facilities on Teal. ‘It would be ok if it didn’t move’ complained Toria. ‘It vould be nice if it vas bigger than half an arse cheek’ added Jojo
Although it got pretty windy while we were gorging ourselves, it never reached the strength that was forecast, and it soon died. Winds were very light in the morning. However, visibility was only a couple of hundred yards, so we spent an extra couple of hours in bed to let it clear a little before setting off. A swell left over from the strong winds was setting towards us, and the winds were only just strong enough to power us through it. However, once we had slid slowly past all the offshore rocks we had a delightful sail along the coast. We kept outside all the remaining islands of the archipelago, which gradually petered out as we continued west.
The wind shifted in the afternoon, and for a brief moment it looked we might be able to lay our next port, Simrisham, on the port tack. No such luck - it soon veered and we were back to beating again. We took a long tack offshore as dusk turned rapidly to night, and bashed into weather that became rather vile. I had already changed down to the small jib before dark, but I had to brave the bucking foredeck twice more in the night, firstly to drop the mizzen and stays’l, and secondly to put a deep reef in the main. Even then we were somewhat overcanvassed in the gusts, gunwale under but going like a train. The seas built up, and we were tossed around.
Around first light we tacked again to close the coast, and found smoother water in the lee of the land. The course into Simrisham harbour lay into the teeth of flukey offshore winds, and we were faced with a complicated dance through several basins and narrow pierheads to reach the marina. Somehow the wind blew from the right places at the right times and we tied up without incident.
Simrisham was once Danish, and the whitewashed church built from massive rough stones was strongly reminiscent of those we had seen around the Limfjord.At the marina we met a couple of characters; a pleasant loony off a neighbouring boat who just wanted to chat (for hours), and an ancient wizened man who possessed a tiny, plastic, fantastically scruffy yacht, a lot shorter even than Teal, a strange craft as humpbacked as he was rigged with a scrawny aluminium pole for a mast. In this cockleshell he said he still sailed alone round this inhospitable coast, though he could no longer walk without leaning heavily on a stick.
The local sailing club cooked up dinner once a week, and it seemed we had arrived on the right night. We adjourned to the clubhouse to make the most of it, though sadly we found that the purchase price only entitled us to one helping of dinner. A rematch between Jojo and I was not possible.
The winds remained in the south-west, and we were getting weary of them. We had tacked almost every inch of the way from Visby, and the forecast was for little change. Toria was due to fly from Germany in a weeks time, and my next crew, Martin, was due to fly out there, so there was little slack in the schedule - we couldn't just sit around hoping for a change. Jojo had to leave sooner, but his flight was from Malmo so anywhere on the coast of Sweden would be good for him.
Once again we found ourselves beating into a rough sea as we rounded the headland south of Simrisham, where the busy familiar ferries from Ystad throbbed by on their way to Bornholm. It was into Ystad that we put that evening as it grew dark, in a rapidly dying wind. We were somewhat bedraggled from punching into the seas, and it was a cold day too. A German couple watched us as we dropped the sails and let our momentum carry us into the narrow gap between their yacht and another, then the man silently ducked into the cabin, and brought out three glasses and a bottle of Grappa to warm our bellies and our hearts.
Jojo’s flight was in the evening the next day. It would be nice to drop him off a bit further along the coast before he sped off to Malmo, but the forecast for once was for very little wind, and we couldn’t guarantee getting to another port to drop him off in enough time to catch his plane. We said our goodbyes after breakfast, and Toria and I set off alone.
We set off under sail, but got less than 200 yards beyond the breakwater before the wind died completely. And there we sat bobbing in the sun. The friendly Germans of the grappa came by and offered us a tow, but there was little excuse for taking one here. We just sat and bobbed. Two hours later a weak wind – easterly, hurrah! - began to stir the sails, and we had a delightful sail along the coast, passing Trelleborg in the gathering dusk, where the blood-red sun silhouetted a row of gently spinning wind turbines. We anchored off the breakwater around the southern entrance to the Falsterbo canal late in the evening, but we would not be tracing our route any further - the plan now was to keep heading south and gain the North Sea via the Kiel Canal.
The alarm went off at 5, as we had a longish passage to Denmark. Just like the previous day there appeared to be a faint breath of wind as we brought the anchor up, but again we had progressed barely ¼ mile before it died. We lay there with sails barely stirring. A yacht was motoring up towards the canal in the half light before the sun rose, and it turned out to be none other than our old friend Picaroon. They stopped and chatted before our ways parted for the last time. This was the last day of their holidays, and they would be at their home berth in Copenhagen by the evening.
The wind was fickle all day. Much of the time we just lay idle; occasionally a puff would send us drifting onwards a little further. Each time it was from a different direction – we had wind from every point of the compass that day.
A mile or so off the Falsterbo headland the visibility dropped, but never enough to be a real danger, although we were crossing busy shipping lanes. All the shipping passing through the Sound meets off Falsterbo – ore carriers from the Bothnian mines, container ships from Russia and Poland, bulk carriers from Germany. All have to squeeze through the little gap between Denmark and Sweden. A very human sniff behind my back made me look round in astonishment as we lay drifting in one calm patch. A curious seal had popped his head up and was watching us calmly with big limpid eyes.
My charts of Denmark weren’t the most detailed available (they were all old cancelled charts from Hatfield Peverel, many of them still marked in fathoms rather than metres), and the route I wanted to take across the shallow sandbank off Bogestrom was particularly poorly represented on the chart we were using. It showed the safe water mark indicating where the channel across began, but none of the subsequent twists and turns in the sinuous channel after that. We did pass a couple of little harbours where we could have stopped to try and buy a better chart, but they were only tiny villages and I didn’t have high hopes that they would have a bookshop or chandlery. Given that the weather was nice I thought we would give the passage a shot anyway – if we couldn’t find our way we could always run back to one of the fishing harbours.
We found the safe water mark where we expected it, and from there could see pairs of red and green buoys ahead marking the channel. The only trouble was that the wind had come round so that it was blowing straight down the channel. We would have to tack, but the pairs of buoys were very close together, so if we wanted to stay in the channel we would have to put in literally hundreds of tacks. However, the sea was so clear here that we found we could see the bottom even when it was several metres beneath the keel, and so we largely ignored the buoys and just kept a careful eye on the seabed. The gradients weren’t steep, so when the sand and seaweed looked like it was beginning to rise towards us we would use our stolen Swedish tree as a sounding pole, tacking when we reckoned we had about 6” of clearance under the keel. Often we found we were a couple of hundred metres outside the official channel before we tacked.
A little Bermudan boat arrived at the safe water mark just before we did, and was also tacking through – one of the few occasions on which we saw any other boat try to sail to windward through a narrow channel on the whole trip. For a while we crossed tacks, but they eventually drew a little ahead. That was fine by us, for the light was failing and it meant we could follow their course through the turns in the channel, which became rather tortuous as we closed the coast.
We did take one wrong turn where we failed to see a buoy that indicated a 90 degree bend in the channel, but realised our mistake shortly before we went aground. It was getting dark though, so as we were now under the shelter of the coast we called it a day shortly after that, anchoring just outside the channel as the stars began to glimmer above us.
In daylight it was a little easier. The channel continued to twist and turn, and although our chart was largely useless except in giving us the general gist of what was happening, the pilot book listed many of the buoys we should expect to see. We could generally work out which side to pass the buoys as they came up, and where it was shallow the sandy bottom was clearly visible anyway, giving us plenty of warning if we were close to running aground. In the sheltered waters we were now in it wouldn’t have mattered much anyway if we had – but I still preferred to avoid it if possible.
We passed under a road bridge, one that I dimly remembered having cycled across on a cyling tour ten years previously, and found ourselves at our favourite activity again – tacking. Here the navigable channel was perhaps 100 yards wide, but a bit of stream was setting against us so it took many many tacks, gaining only a few yards each time, before we passed under another bridge into a more open stretch. Here, although the buoyed channel was still rather narrow, the sandbanks on either side were deep enough for us to sail over and so we could put in much bigger tacks and take life easier. My hands were raw from handling the jib sheets so I was glad to have to do it a little less often.
A third bridge lay ahead, with many piers this time, so we had to short-tack again through the columns. A big three-masted German schooner passed under just before us – with an air draft of maybe 80 feet she had only around a foot clearance. She approached the bridge very slowly and cautiously before deciding it was safe and steaming through.
We were out of the shelter of the land now, and a nasty short sea was running in towards us. We continued beating into it for another few hours. The relatively shallow water made the seas behave quite differently to those we had become used to clawing through along the Swedish coast – it was a more bouncy ride now, and the short seas stopped Teal more than the longer wavelengths we had had before.
Beating most of the day, at times into adverse currents, didn’t allow for a long days run.. There were several harbours we could aim for and we initially aimed for one on one of the larger islands.. But seeing a few masts waving next to a golden field on the smaller island of Faemo on a course that lay a little more off the wind, we changed our minds, eased the sheets and soon were tearing down towards the harbour. It was tiny, with barely any room to manouvre, and half the available quay space was already taken up by the big schooner we had seen at the bridge.
A large number of other yachts were also there. There was only one tiny space left, just big enough for us, tucked under the bowsprit of our big gaff-rigged sister, and as Toria let the last sails flutter down we drifted down and leapt ashore with lines. I liked Faemo at once. It was intensively but sympathetically farmed , and as we walked round we startled hares from the waving golden corn fields that were awaiting their harvesting.
The church was a gem. Clean and simple, the white-washed stone tower looked south over the cornfield, the harbour and the neighbouring islands, surrounded by a beautiful graveyard that was filled with flowers. It felt more like a well-tended garden than a cemetery. I wonder what the Danes would think of our decayed British graveyards, with mossy cracked stones standing at crazy angles, and rampant ivy and nettles. I like the wilderness too, but I think I would rather be laid to rest in a Danish cemetery surrounded by flowers and looking out over the sea.
In the morning we took stock. Toria was due to fly from Germany in only two days time, and we had to cross a biggish body of water to get there. We might still have time to visit another place in Denmark before crossing, if the winds were right, but we certainly couldn’t hang around too long.
We hadn’t gone far before we were becalmed over a shoal that lay south of the island of Vejro. Beneath us through the crystal clear water jellyfish pulsed lazily above a seabed of mixed sand and shingle, where the seaweed waved gently in the slight current that was pushing us sideways and keeping the vista below ever-changing. We sat in the roasting sun with our heads hanging over the side, utterly absorbed in the alien world beneath us.
Currents around these waters are strange things. In settled weather the tidal currents of the North Sea propagate through the Skaggerak and Kattegat and force a regular change on the set of currents through the Little and Great Belts. But pressure differences between the Baltic and North Seas can have considerably greater effect, as can wind stress on the surface waters when winds blow from one quarter for any length of time. Given the relative calm of the last few days it was probably just the turn of the tide that suddenly changed the direction we were going, and began to help us on our way rather than push us back. Soon after that a gentle wind began to help us also – thankfully giving us sufficient steerage way to avoid a large fish farm that we were drifting down upon.
The wind moved round to the south-west for a while, died, and returned from the north. We had not come many miles, and sadly had to give up the hope of a quiet anchorage off a sandy beach for the evening. We decided to carry on overnight and sail the remaining 30 miles to Kiel.
Late in the evening a breeze did build up, and we made a quick passage with the wind on our quarter as far as Kiel light, a couple of miles from the entrance to Kiel Fjord. Here the wind died again, and at dawn we found ourselves briefly becalmed near one of the green channel markers, which was equipped with a horn and was mournfully mooing like a constipated cow.
The Robsons on Picaroon had recommended the British Kiel Yacht Club as a good place to stay (its main attraction a very grand bath - an unknown luxury to a sailor). I wasn’t sure of its exact location, but we ran into a big marina near where I thought it ought to be and tied up. It turned out to be the other side of the breakwater we had just passed. But the club looked like it would be quite tricky to get in and out of in Teal, especially as we had recently lost another rowlock overboard so we were down to just one, which made rowing in and out of these places considerably trickier than normal. As we had to end up ultimately at the moorings by the canal entrance in any case I decided we would just skip the yacht club and moor up there instead. Besides, as rowing or sailing isn’t permitted in the canal I needed to find a boat willing to give me a tow, and I was more likely to find someone heading in the right direction if I hung around near the canal entrance.