Idö

As per yesterday's post, we are now on the island of Idö.
This is an interesting island from a historical point of view: from 1601 until 1986 there was a pilot station here. The local inhabitants of course exactly knew where the rocks are and offered their services to passing ships. Then King Gustaf Vasa made it a requirement for the locals to pilot 'Crown ships' for no remuneration, just a small reduction in taxes. The pilot 'job' was passed from father to son, for 9 generations. When in 1986 the pilot station was abandoned, the harbour was made into a 'Gasthamn' and a restaurant is now on the lookout point. The harbour is small, I think we are here with about 15 boats and it is full.

Here are some pictures of the last few days:

Even though the skerries are mainly rock, there sometimes is an abundance of pretty colours!

These Swedish ladies had a few problems with the heck buoys.. 

Isn't it just like you are part of a postcard? 

Only 4 of the houses in Klintemåla are permanently occupied, the rest (maybe 20 or so) are summer houses. There is a very very small shop, only open in summer. And a letterbox, the harbour master told us with some pride...

Some of the 'lighthouses' look as if they house pixies.

When navigating through the 'Skärgård', you need to concentrate all the time. Lots of buoys, marking rocks!

The Idö guest harbour as seen from what is now the restaurant.

This map shows the route (in red), we have taken from Karlskrona.

This video (you probably need to click on it to see it, I have not done this before), shows a short bit of today's trip through the Skärgård.

Klintemåla

We are looking for and  finding smaller and smaller harbours! We are Now in Klintemåla (the Swedish 'å' is pronounced as a sort of 'o')
To get here, we had to navigate another narrow channel, with not that many buoys. It's bit like " we'll show you where the underwater rocks are, but the ones just on the surface you'll have to spot yourself'.
But the reward is a harbour straight from a postcard, with just a few yachts.


I'll post some pictures in the next few days, I am struggling doing this from the iPad.

Probably to Idø tomorrow, an old pilot station turned guest harbour. If you look on the map, it's near Västervik. I'll also get a map, showing our route since Karlskrona.

Sandvik and Figeholm

Apologies for the break in posts. We spent a second night in Bornholm and with exception of the diver arriving to (successfully) remove the line out of our neighbours prop, there was not really anything to report.
Yesterday, we moved on to Sandvik, a small harbour about 2 and a bit hours north of Bornholm on the Öland coast. Its a nice small harbour with a pleasant atmosphere:

It also boasts the biggest "Dutch windmill" in Scandinavia:

This is called the 'stone coast'. For centuries, the main source of income has been the stones one finds here. They get polished and used, I am not sure what for. But they are quite pretty even unpolished. And you can also see them in the crystal-clear water:

The only problem was the absence of usable internet connection, either 3G or WiFi and hence the lack of a blogpost yesterday.

This morning we crossed the Kalmar Sund in a North Westerly direction. On the way you pass the 'Blå Jungfrun', the 'Blue Maiden' an island that has fascinated mariners for centuries. It was said that it was bewitched. In the early 1900's, it was destined to become a gigantic quarry. A wealthy industrialist bought it in order to stop than plan and was instrumental in having it declared a nature reserve which it still is today:

As you can see, the weather was nice today, almost no wind, quite a bit of sun but still relatively cool.

We did just over 3 hours to Figeholm, a small settlement that has been in existence since the 1400's.
You enter through a rocky channel that is well marked with buoys and end up in another small harbour:

This is just north of Oskarshamn, the beginning of the 'Skärgård' that stretches all the way beyond Stockholm. This is the area that we want to explore for the next few weeks, so we have now more or less arrived at our 'destination' (although we plan to end up quite a bit further north, in Norrköping).

We will generally to small stretches from now on. We are planning to anchor in a few quiet places and use the dinghy to go ashore. so we inflated the dinghy, attached the electric outboard and tried it out:

We'll probably stay here tomorrow as well and explore the surroundings on foot and by dinghy!

Borgholm

As we knew the wind would be coming up this afternoon, we left Kalmar at 8:30 for a 3 hour trip up the Kalmar Sund to Borgholm. Borgholm is the main town on Öland, the narrow island to the East of mainland Sweden (not to be confused with Gotland, which is much bigger and lies about 50 miles off the coast).
Borgholm has a castle ruin and the Royal summer estate 'Solliden' is here.

 Solliden and the 'Royal Mooring Jetty' as seen from the water. There is an exclusion zone around it, we are just outside that zone here.

Borgholm castle ruin 

The wind did indeed pick up (it is actually quite unpleasant weather at the moment, grey, windy and quite cold). In these conditions it is quite tricky to pick up a heck buoy with a side-on wind. This Swedish yacht tried to tie up next to us, went over their own heck-buoy line and ended up getting it into the propellor. It took the harbour master with his dinghy plus a few bystanders to get the boat moored. Now they'll need to dive to get the line out of the prop....

Its likely we'll be here tomorrow as well.

Ekenäs and Kalmar

Last night, we were in Ekenäs. That is a very small harbour, about 12 miles South of Kalmar. Also very remote and no 3G Internet connection for a blog post.
But very nice and peaceful it was! The weather was good too, so we walked around the village which is in between the woods. Nice houses in big gardens!
We were the only visiting boat in the harbour which also hosts a handful of local yachts plus some small fishing dinghies. But on the noticeboard in the clubhouse we read that there is Wednesday sailing every week in  season! That seems to be a universal habit.

Here are a few Ekenäs pictures:

This morning we left after breakfast for the 12 mile trip to Kalmar, a relatively big town halfway up the Kalmar Sund.
You soon see the very impressive "Kalmar Slot":

The Kamar Sund is full of rocks here. There are some big beacons to assist you to keep clear of the rocks which are partly above and partly under water and quite close to the fairway!

Then you get into the very well equipped marina:

We first filled up with Diesel, almost 300l since Rendsburg in the Kiel Canal. We were happy with the diesel consumption of 0.75l per (nautical) mile.

We will have a rest day here tomorrow, the weather will be rainy. It still certainly is not summer, its about 17C or so during the day. It was sunny until 5pm today, after that it started raining. We had drinks here on board with our Dutch neighbours, we first met in Karlskrona a few days ago, then both moved on to Kristianopel. They gave us the tip to go to Ekenäs (although they skipped it themselves) and today we are neighbours in Kalmar again. It happens relatively regularly that you meet people a few times in subsequent harbours, talk and become friendly. Its a nice nautical sort of wat of living!

Kristianopel

Kristianopel is a small town at the Southern end of the Kalmar Sund. It has an interesting history as it was built as a Danish defence against the Swedes in the time that the province of Blekinge was still Danish. As such it had extensive defensive walls, of which considerable bits are still in existence.
These days it has a camping and a very nice small guest harbour which is a popular stop on the way to and from Kalmar. Add to that that it is midsummer weekend and you will understand that we had some doubts if we would find a place here. We arrived a bit after 1pm (in a major rain squall) and fortunately there were still a few places available. You tie up with the bow to the quay and a line hooked to a 'heck buoy' quite a few of which are provided some 15 metres from the shore. Its a system that is used extensively in Sweden and makes it possible to get a lot of boats into a small space. More than one can share a heck buoy and you lie against each other (with fenders in between of course).
Here are a few pictures, the first was taken by people on a Dutch yacht who were our neighbours in Karlskrona and also ended up here. The others show the harbour entrance as seen from the back of Onbekommerd (including the heck buoy) and the harbour square as seen from our from deck.

We are not entirely sure yer what we'll do tomorrow. The most likely is to go a short hop to Ekenäs, a small and somewhat remote harbour between here and Kalmar.

Midsummer

Yesterday, there was the 'leaf market' in Karlskrona. It is a very big market which is traditionally held on the day before midsummer's eve. Apart from the usual stuff that is sold at markets all over Europe (toys, wallets, hamburgers, some clothes), they sell a lot of strawberries and cherries as well as flowers. Only today did we understand why....

Yesterday also, there was a notice in the harbour office that one could participate in the midsummer celebrations. On enquiry, it transpired that we would be taken by car to Ronneby and from there by boat to Karön where we would join in the midsummer festivities of the local community. The person responsible for the Karlskrona marina also runs the Ronneby harbours, which explains the setup.

This morning, the weather was not very inviting (rainy and 13C in the cabin!), but we decided that if it was good enough for the Swedes it would be good enough for us. We were the only two takers from the marina and we went by car to Ronneby, about 20 minutes away. And then by a little ferry to Käron (we stopped there 2 years ago with Onbekommerd when we were in this area!)

After a while,  more and more people arrived on the island and they started to make preparations around the 'midsummer pole'. The men tied the branches to the pole and the ladies and the children made the garlands which end up being tied to the 'arms'. Then the pole is raised, we thought this might be with some ceremony, but it was not:

Until this moment, it had been dry, but unfortunately at that point the rain started coming down. A lot of families had set up picknicks on the lawn and the hastily retreated under the trees and put up umbrellas:

That was a pity, but it did not seem to dampen the spirits a lot. There was music too and the children did some dancing around the pole, in very clearly defined ways. Unfortunately with the rain, it was not really possible to get close and take pictures and also the dancing was not as festive as it undoubtedly would be in fine weather.

At this stage, our host (the harbour master), invited us in for a traditional midsummer lunch:

Extremely nice bread, cheese, herring, eggs and the strawberries and cherries (not pictured) we saw on the market.

And the flowers? Well, they adorned the heads of the little girls (and some of the ladies too).

To celebrate this festival, which is very important in Sweden, in such way with your community is really something! And we felt privileged to be able to be there as the only foreigners!



We are not sure yet what we will do tomorrow. The winds will be light, but there will be some rain. We would like to go to Kristianopel, but it might be full for midsummer (the festivities will last another day, but more in family surroundings). We'll see.

Karlskrona

As promised, first here are a few pictures we took at Tärnö yesterday:

A few locals have boats on a mooring 

 The 'harbour' is called Laxboden, this is the 'kiosk' where you also pay the harbour fees (not a cheap harbour, actually). There also is what looks like a restaurant, but that was closed. In the evening a lot of boats from the smaller islands around arrived and they all barbecued (like good Swedes do in summer) and stayed for the night. So the harbour was full of 'locals' plus two Dutch boats!

Postboxes for the holiday homes on the island 

From the highest point of the island there is a nice view over the 'skärgård'. 

 The lighthouse is supposedly the oldest still working wooden lighthouse in Sweden. Of course if you put sufficient requirements in place, one always has a 'unique' occurrence. The Swedes are pretty good at that, they are proud of there heritage.

 The only two 'guests' in the harbour. Both Dutch. We have seen quite a lot of Dutch boats the last week or so. Most of them are kept in Germany or Southern Denmark, just 4 to 6 hours drive from where the people live. If you sail for longer periods at a time, thats quite a good idea as you don't have to go the whole way through the German Bight which can be a (weather) problem. For us it's easier as we take the 'inland route'.

 This is Tärnö's ferry jetty. There is a ferry a few times a day.

We looked at the weather forecast this morning and noticed that from this afternoon there will be quite a bit of wind for a few days. Plus it is going to rain quite a bit. So we decided to skip Ronneby and go straight to Karlskrona. We have been here before and although the town is not particularly attractive it is steeped in Naval history and it has all you need in the way of provisioning for a few days, which Ronneby does not have. And it has a large, sheltered marina. 

So we had a pleasant three and a half hour trip, first over the open sea and then through the islands to Karlskrona. On arrival,we found that the marina facilities have been modernised so that's good!

This is the "Godnatt", the citadel in the approach to Karlskrona.