Pommern
Marieham had attracted me because it holds a special place in the history of sail. As sail gave way to steam over the turn of last century, just one fleet of square-riggers remained trading, and it was tiny, remote, Marieham that they called their home port. Moshulu, Pommern, Archibald Russell, Olivebank and their sisters were kept alive by the bloody-mindedness of one Gustaf Erikson. While everyone else was busy building steamships, he kept going with sail, and bought up the old ships and barques that everyone else was selling off. He ran them as cheaply as he possibly could, cutting crew numbers to a minimum, paying them a pittance, feeding them little but rotten potatoes. He could still just clear a profit by sending them to out of the way ports in Australia for the grain trade, tiny ports that weren’t economic for the steamers.
Pommern is the only one left of that once-proud fleet, still lying moored to her old quay in the western harbour. Gustaf's son, Edgar, donated her to the city when, a year or two after his fathers death, he had to admit finally that the square-riggers could no longer pay.
As a boy, the travel writer Eric Newby signed on as an apprentice in an Ericson ship, the Moshulu. The Last Grain Race is his account of the voyage, recording the rough life of those short-handed crews as they battled with the Southern Ocean, and it was a read I had thoroughly enjoyed. So I was keen to see Pommern, who is the only surviving ship of that era to remain almost unchanged from the day she retired. She retains her cavernous hold, the tiny focs’l where the hands slept, the barely more luxurious quarters aft for the skipper and mates.
We spent an enjoyable morning exploring her decks. It was an enjoyment tinged with slight sadness that she no longer sails - although a group of local enthusiasts have made a new suite of sails for her, and kept her rigged so that she could in theory slip her lines tomorrow, and turn her head south once more for the roaring forties. A better fate than our own Cutty Sark, encased in concrete in Greenwich, or that of her sister Moshulu, towed to the States to be turned into a speciality restaurant. Perhaps a better fate though is that of Kruzenstern and Sedov, who still work the seas for a living - albeit with cargos of cadets rather than the grain they once carried. At least they still feel the slow heave of an ocean wave, feel the salt spray, hear the low steady thrum of a trade wind in the rigging. Most of the Ericson fleet were simply cut down for scrap.
No trade winds or passages round the Horn for Teal though; our route lay east, and we set sail once again, through a short canal that provided an alternative route out of the eastern harbour into the almost land-locked inland sea of Lumparn.
The canal was very sheltered, and when the bridge crossing it finally opened after a long wait we found ourselves becalmed. We got the oars out quickly, for the bridge doesn’t open for long, but there was a current flowing against us and we were making slow progress. A passing yacht offered us a tow, and we slipped through shortly before the bridge shut. In the open water at the far side we cast off again, and were soon winding through a patchwork of islands on the far side, short tacking where the channel bent round into the wind, then enjoying a frisky beat across the more open waters of Lumparn.
The islands of Aland merge with those of the Finnish coast, but there is a patch of water between where the islands are smaller and less thickly scattered. A rather strong wind swept us across this gap on the following day, and quite a sea ran in places where there was sufficient fetch. Even in the more sheltered waters we reached later in the afternoon we had a fast, exhilarating, and not always comfortable sail.
We could do with a good sheltered anchorage on a day like that, and found an ideal one in Toras Viken. We shot through the narrow entrance, which was bordered by a high promontory on one side, a cliff on the other and had a few submerged rocks scattered about offshore just to make it more interesting, and rounded up off a wooded bank to drop anchor. Growing beneath the trees a crop of delicious fat bilberries, so Hamish and I gathered plenty. Though the whole summer we were rarely short of a handful of the tasty nuggets to liven up our morning muesli.
Turku was now only a days sail away, and we reached it the next day – a rather gentler sail for the wind had died and we were in more sheltered waters. We stopped at a yacht club a couple of miles from the town, for the last mile or so along the channel looked narrow and rather uninteresting, and was dead to windward into the bargain. Here we finally crossed tracks with the Tall Ships Race I had sailed back in 1996, for that had ended in Turku after a cruise amongst the islands on the south coast of Finland from St Petersburg. We caught a bus into town in the evening. Seeing the town again brought back happy memories. The quay, empty now, had been packed 3 or 4 deep with the boats of 30 countries, dressed in all their flags and colours, and thronged with thousands of spectators. There was the river they had held rowing races on (our crew, mostly a motley bunch of students and schoolkids had put up a spirited fight against a squad of enormous Russian sailors from the training ship Mir). There was our the wall we had been tied up to, lying outside a Polish Barqentine and the friendly British brig Astrid. I had stayed a day longer than most of my crew, as I was meeting a friend in Helsinki to do a cycling trip, but as I clamboured ashore with my bike to find some nook in a park to put my tent up, the crew of Astrid insisted I stay with them. I got to bed finally about 5 in the morning, after a long evening of drinking, and the subsequent cycle to Helsinki was taken at a very slow pace.
Turku was quieter now. We ate in a cafe in the town square. I opted for reindeer pizza. If you order reindeer pizza, I think you are entitled to expect the odd bit of gristle and fur, and a big red juicy nose splat in the middle. I was disappointed. This was processed, mechanically recovered reindeer with not-more-than-25%-added-water. Little cubes of mushy red gunk straight from a tin were all that remained of Rudolf. So much for Finnish cuisine.
My Finnish charts only took us as far as Hanko, a couple of days sail away, so we returned into town by bus in the morning to do some shopping. The Finnish charts are excellent – lots of detail is needed for navigating through the rocks, so they sell the charts as booklets of 20 or 30 big detailed pages, which have even more detailed insets of all the really tricky bits. The best feature is that they come in plastic wallets so you can bring them up on deck without too much risk of damage. I had borrowed sets that covered Aland and the archipelago around Turku, but I needed the booklets that covered the islands to the east. When we asked at the marina where I might find the next folio we were given the address of a chandlery in the town. After much hunting all we found was a derelict building, so I returned to the tourist information and asked if they had any better ideas. Try a bookshop was their advice, and lo, there was the folio I needed, which covered the whole of the south coast from Hanko to Helsinki.
I also managed to get a replacement mobile phone in Turku – mine had recently died a salty death in the bilges. Teal ate mobile phones; she had already consumed Catherines, and mine wasn't the last she would claim. I got the oldest, most beaten up one I could find from a stall that sold them secondhand, for a bargain 16 euros. It did me proud the remainder of the trip, as long as I was in Europe. It was only when I got back to the UK that I discovered it didn’t work on the same frequency as my network there, and so was useless at home.
Loaded with our purchases we returned to our ship, and slipped from the yacht club early in the afternoon. From Turku we turned south, towards Hanko, the peninsula that marks the south-western corner of the Finnish mainland. Glorious winding passages amongst close islands marked the afternoons sailing, easy enough initially with a light northerly behind, rather more challenging when it blew harder from the east where a dog-leg in the channel meant some close tacking, and quiet and relaxing at the end of the day when the wind died away again. A bit of rowing was needed to reach our anchorage shortly before midnight, our way in lit by an orange moon low on the horizon.
August dawned clear and sunny – but with very little wind. We spent most of the day drifting and reading. It was notable for one event though, for we set the topsail for the first time. It was not that we had never had suitable weather for it up ‘til then, merely that I had never got round to fixing a couple of blocks on the gaff to reeve the sheet. Unfortunately we discovered it was a bit hard to make it set well. Our jeweller friend in Alderney had ordered it, but never used it, so it was brand new. But I’m not convinced it was measured terribly well, for the leach was always saggy and the foot rather tight. I later improved it a little with some gentle butchery, but it has always remained more of a down-wind sail, where it’s proclivity to bulge in the wrong places is less of a disadvantage.
We found a beautiful anchorage that evening in Vikarbukten, where a smoothed, rose-pink slab of granite swept into the sea. We dropped the anchor off the stern, and nosed up so that we could jump onto the rock and tie the bowsprit to a convenient tree that grew in a crevice. In the long evening sun we took a walk along a quiet track, and came across the town centre – 3 houses, a post office and a tiny cafe, where we enjoyed a cool beer. Back at the boat we cooked over an open fire and ate the wild raspberries and bilberries we had collected on our walk, with the forest at our backs, and before us the slope of rock, the sea and a thousand islands lit by the last rays of the sun.
It was foggy when we awoke and checked out the weather (merely a case of cracking open the forehatch and sitting up in bed), and it was also windless, so we lazily lay down again for an extra hour in bed. A breath of easterly was gently lifting the mist as we set out, tacking slowly back into the main channel. Slow tacking was the order of the day, when we weren’t completely becalmed.
Hanko lies at the end of an arm of mainland that sticks right through the sea of islands, so that anyone travelling along the coast has no option but to pass through. As it is also the only town of any size for a considerable distance, it gets rather busy in the summer as yachts use it as a convenient stopping point and revictualling station. Much as I would have liked to avoid another town, we had to stop, Hamish needed transport to the airport, and we could do with some grub, so in the cool of the evening we tacked into the busy marina and found ourselves a berth for the night.