Hällevik

First of all, apologies for not posting the last few days. We have had wonderful (motor)boating conditions and have been making big progress steps every day, but that is not an excuse for letting the blog slip!

First of all, a few pictures from our 'epic' crossing from Denmark to Sweden. It started with passing Møns Klint, which at 125m high is quite spectacular:

As you can see below, we crossed the 'border' from Denmark into Sweden after 20.8nm:

Ystad is a nice place with a good guest harbour. We managed to get  new Swedish 3G card for the iPads, so we have internet almost anywhere. we find the Swedish and Danish 3G offerings the best we have encountered anywhere!

After one night in Ystad, we continued to Simrishamn. It was again nice and quiet, here is the 'lunch buffet' on board. we can only do this in calm conditions when we know the lunch won't end up on the floor!

This 'Gästhamn' flag shows you that you are entering a harbour which meets certain standards. Quite high standards actually as far as toilets, showers, washing machines etc are concerned.

Again, we only spent one night in Simrishamn and early this morning we set off to Hällevik. North of Simrshamn is a 'shooting range', which ranges 22KM (12 miles) into the sea. It is only used a few times a year, but today was such a day. We know about the 'shooting range' and we always check in the harbour if anything is happening. So today we had to make a bit of a detour (actually our destination of Hällevik was influence by the shooting programme), to go around the area. 

To start with, there were jus fishing boats:

But we heard a bit of loud sounds and on the AIS we noticed that it was a full scale navy exercise, with big ships from several countries: Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Poland and the 'NATO Warship' on the right is a 200m long British vessel!

There were also some small Swedish patrol boats rafted together, presumably to watch out that no-one entered the danger zone"

One of them came alongside us and asked us if we knew about the exercises. We answered that we did and that we would stay away. They were happy with that and the very friendly Swedish Navy guy told us that we also had to keep clear by 2000m from any naval vessel even outside the exclusion area.

This is 'NATO Warship"

A helicopter had just landed here.

There were two hovercraft. There make an incredible noise which transmits under water and was very loud on our boat. As if our engine was vibrating!

Just over 4 hours after leaving Simrishamn, we got to Hällevik:

They have quite a problem with underwater growth here:

So there is a 'ship wash' facility, to wash the bottom of your boat! Not a bad idea if you keep your boat in this harbour!

Harbour office

 This picture, taken of the track on our chart plotter, shows where we are and how we got here. The red line is the track. Groningen (Netherlands) is in the left bottom corner and Hällevik in the right top.

As we have done six pretty solid days motoring, of over 30 miles per day and over 5 hours per day average, we are going to give ourselves one or two rest days. We have made good use of wonderful conditions. Tomorrow is going to be a bit more windy and also we have made (more than) the progress we wanted to make. Hällevik is small and quiet and there are a few nature reserves around where we will take a bit of a wolk tomorrow.