Uncharted waters
We were now in the Kattegat. Not far beyond the eastern horizon lay Sweden, and to the south of us the Danish islands kept their guard at the mouth of the Baltic proper. There are three ways through the islands, all winding and constricted. The narrowest channel, the Little Belt, lies closest to the Danish mainland, while the - not much wider - Great Belt is bounded by the islands of Fyn and Sjælland. The Sound is the easternmost channel, bordered by the twin cities of Copenhagen on the Danish side and Malmö on the Swedish. We aimed for The Sound, for we only had a couple of days before Julian would be leaving leave us, and Anne and Holly would be flying to Stockholm to join us in his stead. They had booked their flights several months earlier when I had optimistically thought we might have made it farther north by the end of June. The least I could do was try and make sure we were in the right country.
The wind was fair, and we had a charming overnight sail down the Kattegat. It made life much easier to have three on board, and I let Julian and Catherine take alternate watches while I helped whenever any deck work or navigation was needed. The day dawned clear with only distant smudges of land in sight, and the 'sky mostly blue, scattered red cumulus and cirrus above' if the log is to be believed. Log entries became considerably more verbose while we had Catherine aboard, with a tendency to be more poetic than practical.
All that day we continued towards Sweden. We passed Elsinore in the early evening ('no sign of Hamlet', recorded the log) and continued more slowly in lighter winds through another night ('full moon, orange, low in the sky ahead'). By mid-morning we were approaching Copenhagen, where the wind died completely.
We spent almost an entire day drifting idly off the Copenhagen breakwater, which was surmounted by a number of enormous wind turbines. If anything we were losing gound due to a slight current setting us back, for although the Baltic is tideless, wind and pressure differences between the North and Baltic Seas can build us strong currents through the Belts and the Sound. Calms never last forever though. In the afternoon a wind slowly filled in and we began to make ground again, and ever so slowly we crept past the city.
We were navigating on one of the old charts from the chandlery at Hatfield Peverel, and since it had been published the Swedes and Danes had bridged the Sound. The scale of the work they have done is phenomenal. The combined road and rail bridge that soars across from Malmo is 5 miles long, but even that isn't long enough to reach the Danish shore. It descends on a 2 1/2 mile-long artificial island, and the crossing continues beneath the waves in a tunnel
We sailed past Peberholm, the new island, moving well in the freshening wind, although sadly it had also headed us so we were again having to tack. I had just gone below to use the heads when there came a sound of a giant zip being unfastened. That was strange - I had already undone my flies. ‘Um, Andy – I think you should come up!’ cried Catherine. ‘The mast is falling over!’
Indeed it was – the zipping sound was the starboard lower shroud unfastening itself, and the mast was bending alarmingly, all the strain being taken up by the topmast shroud. We tacked quickly to let the strain come on the port shrouds instead.
Now we had a problem, because the tack we were on was taking us towards the artificial island. Even with the jib backed on the other side to slow us we were drifting slowly but surely towards it. So repairing the rigging was a race against time. It turned out the problem was that the bulldog grips I had used to make an eye in the bottom of the shroud had slipped as they hadn’t been done up tightly enough. It didn’t take more than a few minutes to loosen them off fully, pull the wire that had slipped tight again, tighten the bulldog grips and finally make the shroud good and taught by winding up the bottlescrew. We were able to tack back onto a safe course again a few hundred yards before we drifted ashore – although I didn’t go below again until I had gone round all the other bulldog grips with a spanner and made sure they were all nice and tight.
The rest of the trip was uneventful. Slowly we closed with the Swedish coast, and ahead of us appeared the low forested ground of the Skanor peninsula. A canal was dug through the peninsula to allow ships (small ones) to shorten their route and avoid the sandbanks (and wartime mines) that lay offshore. We thought we might as well take the short cut, and the little harbour at the northern end would be a convenient place to drop off Julian and pick up Anne and Holly. The wind died again utterly as we approached, so we tried out the new plastic rowlocks that we had bought in Aalborg, and pronounced them a great success as we rowed into the little harbour.
We hadn’t been in the marina long when we spied two familiar figures walking along the harbour wall towards us. It was good to see Anne and Holly again, who had been crewmembers on a boat I had sailed during a Tall Ships Race a couple of years previously. But alas, there was going to be little enough space for four of us, let alone five. It was time to say goodbye to Julian. As ever, his plans were a bit vague, but he thought he might travel round Denmark for a few days before getting a flight back. He stayed around with us that evening, and pitched his tent in the woods nearby for the night.
As things turned out perhaps he could have stayed a little longer. Anne took me aside and confessed she had been quite ill recently, and didn’t think she’d be able to stay for long. She had nearly not come at all, she said. We agreed that in the morning we’d see how things were, and at least move on through the canal and along the coast a little way – there were odd harbours along the coast we could halt at if necessary, although I would have much preferred to do a long leg right round the southern end of Sweden and make progress north to the archipelagoes.
The road bridge at the northern end of the canal swung open at its allocated hour in the morning, and we rowed through in company with a couple of other yachts. They soon motored into the distance as we pottered along under oars, the thick woods on either side preventing even the tinyest of zephyrs from reaching us.
The canal opens out into a large area enclosed by a breakwater, and here we got up sail. Soon we were having a pleasant sail along the coast, for the wind gradually picked up. But poor Anne was looking pale and tired, and was suffering again from the stomach cramps which had been plagueing her. It wasn’t long before she was below curled up in a bunk, and we decided we should give up on trying to make a long passage.
Ystad was a few miles further on, and was the next place we could stop. It didn’t look too enticing – a biggish port, it’s main function being the ferry terminal for the high speed ferries that sail down to the Danish island of Bornholm. But it would do. In the late afternoon we found ourselves off the breakwater, and sailed into the marina tucked into the corner of the western arm.
I went with Anne to the library in the morning to use the internet so we could book a flight back for her. It turned out that both of us had lost track of the date, for we thought we were booking a flight a couple of days ahead that turned out to be still 4 days away! But the enforced break in Ystad was probably very good for me, for we took those four days very easy. I was feeling rather jaded, for I had been driving myself hard for the months of the refit and the crossing of the North Sea, and we hadn’t been pacing ourselves since we had arrived in Thyborøn either. We did get a few odd jobs done on the boat – even started on some of the varnishing, which had so far been entirely neglected. And, to keep Catherine-the-archaeologist happy, one day we took a bus out to an ancient stone circle a few miles away, perched high above the sea on a headland, with magnificent views over the southern Baltic.
On the 9th it was time to go. Anne's flight wasn’t until the evening, but if we hung around until then we would probably have ended up staying another night, and it was time we pressed on north. At noon we said our goodbyes, and left her sitting in a cafe until it was time for her to go to the airport.
I wasn't in a terribly good mood, wondering if I was really up to the challenge of sailing a small engineless boat in these unfamiliar waters. I’m afraid I may not have been good company for the others the next couple of days – particularly for Catherine, whose boisterous talkative personality filled the tiny confines of Teals cabin to overflowing.
The weather didn’t help my state of mind. We rowed out the harbour in a calm, and as soon as we were out thick fog rolled along and shrouded us. We could hear the whining turbines of leviathan high speed catamaran ferries on their way to the offshore island of Bornholm. Although I was fairly confident we were clear to the north of their route it was nerve-wracking to hear the engines' beat grow louder and louder as one approached, and immensely relieving when it finally began to die away again.
It was a few hours before a south-westerly wind blew up and rolled the fog back, but by the morning we were careering on our way in seas that were steadily building. Off Karlskrona it increased to a force 7, rather more than I wanted to be out in. Teal seemed to revel in it, although I found it stressful; especially the navigation as we neared the remote rocky island of Utklippan, where our route took us between the Karlskrona archipelago and the offshore lighthouse. A buoy marked a reef that we had to avoid, but it was only a spindly spar buoy, and not easy to spot in the welter of foam that the confused seas threw up. Several times I took fixes with the handheld compass on the lighthouse and the headland, so that I would know which direction to look in, but for a long time the buoy remained invisible as we sped along towards the danger. Finally on the crest of a wave it appeared momentarily, and we knew we were safe. The conditions grew much calmer in the shelter of the headland, as we turned north to head up Kalmarsund.
The long thin island of Oland stretches for seventy miles down the Swedish east coast, with the hour-glass shaped Kalmarsund separating it from the mainland. At the waist lies Kalmar, looking over a channel that is only a couple of miles wide – but so strewn with rocks and shallows that the navigable section is marked by buoys that are only 30 or 40 yards apart. It was in the wee small hours of the night that we found ourselves approaching Kalmar, running past the buoys marking the shallows and tacking into the confined waters of the harbour to find a berth alongside a smart German yacht in the cramped marina. I was getting a little more used to handling Teal in such situations now, and was a little more sure what I could get away with. But I was tired after another long passage with little sleep, and was glad to get her moored up without incident.