The Summer House

Been a while since I've got round to posting anything new, not really sure if anyone's reading this stuff anyway but I'll try to post some updates never the less.

Once at the summer house we had about 10 days to lounge around and do typical Swedish summer house type stuff.  This essentially involves eating a lot and drinking loads of wine.  A big part of this though is doing a bit of hunter gathering type stuff.

We put out stömming(herring) nets in the evening and got up early to collect the catch.  Someone once said to me 'you will never be a fisherman', but I can now safely say that we had the biggest haul of the season on our first attempt.  As well as getting points for catching herring, you also loose points for catching simpa, a spiny bugger of a fish that is unedible and horrible to remove from the nets.


Here we are picking off the ströming from the nets.

...and the final result...

...57 ströming and 0 simpa, a fine catch indeed.

Henrik, Nina's brother in law, is a very fine cook indeed and prepared them both in the traditional 'butterflied and fried' way as well as smoking some in Nina's mum's new smoking machine to create little smoked herring, böckling in Swedish.

There was also a lot of gathering of wild strawberries, raspberries and blue berries which ended up in various deserts at the daily barbecue feast.

As well as the eating and drinking, another common Swedish summer pass time is building stuff.  This is one of my favorite things about Sweden, you can buy anything you need to build anything you want in Sweden in numerous excellent DIY type stores that put Homebase to shame.  The projects this year were continuing work on a new sauna, installing the electricity and finishing off the roof, and building a wooden staircase in the garden that Nina's sister, Erica, and Henrik designed and Nina and I installed.

My camera started plating up, but you can see the sauna to the left and the foundation for the stairs in the picture below.

Marie was anchored off the jetty most of the time we were there, the wind usually blows from the East in the bay where the summer house is located, but the winds picked up 20+ knots from the South, leaving Marie hanging just a few meters from a lee shore.  Although the anchor did seem to be holding, it was just too close for comfort, and a neighbour very kindly let us use his mooring boy until the wind died down a bit.

One other highlight of the summer house was a visit from Nina's great uncle Rolf, who is now in his 80's.  He is a lovely man, and we took him out for a short sail in Marie, his first time ever sailing which delighted him, and me for that matter.

It was a nice break from passage making every day, but in the end I had to get Marie back home.

To Ö-vik

After a relaxing in Sundsvall we headed off again on the 10^th July (as you can see I’m getting a little behind with the blogging).

We were promise south westerly winds, but either we were going in the wrong direction or the wind hadn’t listened to the forecast that day as it blew from the north east all day.  Tacking into the steep Baltic chop wasn’t much fun, so after about 25 miles we sought shelter in a likely looking bay on an island called Härnön.  We got lucky and found it to be very sheltered from the weather, so we dropped the anchor and listened to the listened to the local enjoying the summer in their boat houses.

The following morning we made an early start to reach Nina’s uncle’s summer house in a fjärden called gaviksfjärden, this is in the heart of Höga kusten (the high coast) and is a nature reserve as well as being a world heritage site.

Immediately after leaving the safety of the bay we were greeted by every sailor’s worst nightmare; fog.  Despite losing site of the land, we still had about 50 meters of visibility so there was no real danger (I might have been less relaxed without the plotter though.  It didn’t last long and after a while the shape of the land high landscape started looming out of the fog.

  

The fog cleared to reveal another lovely day with southerly winds.  With the swell in the open sea from the previous days wind we poled out the jib and took a bit of detour to have a look at Högakustenbron (The High Coast Bridge) – it’s the third longest suspension bridge in Europe at 1 867 meters.  We dropped the anchor and had lunch in the shadow of the bridge.

 

After lunch we got back on course and continued through the beautiful islands of the high coast towards gaviksfjärden.

 

Once in the fjärden we hit more fog, but this soon cleared and we made our way up to the summer house.  We anchored just off their jetty, but being in the north of the large fjärden just a few meters from the shore, with a strong southerly wind, it wasn’t the most comfortable place to be.  I left the engine running just in case and Nina tried to call them up.

 

They had gone out for the day so we decided it best to find shelter in a nearby nature harbour.  This area is a popular cruising ground so we expected everything to be crowded, but on reaching the harbour we found only one other boat anchored there, and took the only available spot to rock moor on the north side of a small island.

 

The morning forecast of rain and a force 6 was not too encouraging, but at least in the right direction, so we decided to head out anyway.  Fortunately in this area there are lots of harbours close by so we could easily abort if the weather turned nasty.   As it happed as soon as we got out of the fjärden into the sea we hit a very nasty swell and had the wind on the nose, so we just motored up to the closest marina in a small village called Barsta; at least Nina got to try out some foul weather gear.

Barsta was actually a very charming little place with an old chapel.  We spent the day exploring the area and had dinner in the little restaurant there.

 After losing a day we were keen to get a move on, and for this final leg to Örnskoldsvik the weather gods smiled on us once more; sunshine and a southerly wind.  There was still an uncomfortable swell in the open Baltic, but after a couple of hours we were sheltered by a large island called Ulvön and a had a fast run up to backfärden where the summer house is located.

The final passage into Bäckfjärden is through a very narrow dredged channel just a few meters wide.  We were on a dead run and the jib was playing up a bit, but we decided to sail through it anyway out of principle.  Then we were in Bäckfjärden with just a couple of miles to go to our final destination.

So we'd made it.  Coming up here has been a plan for a long time now, and finally getting here was a great feeling.  We'd done it in 11 days, 3 days ahead of plan, which gave us plenty of time to hang out in the summer house.  The total distance from Stockholm was 385 nautical miles (715km).

Now I just have to get back...