Denmark

Good spinnaker reach up the belt on Thursday. We crept out early with one other boat so as not to wake the couples on the loveboats (why is the girl always much younger than the bloke?) and to get our ropes on the next jetty before the Germans. The forecast F5 turned out to be a F3/4 and we realised that our companion was getting away from us using his kite - so up went ours. A satisfactory hour later, we left him in the dust. Pat swears we hit 8 knots, but the log only reads 7.8...

A lovely sail from Vejro, across Smälands Farvandet, through the Storstrom to Kalvehave. Then an exciting trip out through Stege Bucht and the Bøgestrom to Rødvig, and from there to Copenhagen. The Storstrom and Stege Bucht have extremely narrow, winding, shallow channels which require exacting navigation, but we had a good wind angle and managed to have a really good sail all the way. This route really epitomises what cruising sailing is all about. In some places the main channel is less than 100 metres across, and the water depth less than 2 meters. The scenery is stunning, and, to add a little spice, some local fishermen lay pots in the channel. Unfortunately, its difficult to do justice to the trip in pictures, but you'll have to take our word for it.

We decided to stay south of Copenhagen, as, with the Swedish Bank Holiday coming up, we figured things would be busy. The forecast for the week ahead looked (and turned out to be, abysmal) so we holed up at Brondby. Brondby is part of the Strandparken Nature reserve, an area of beaches and marinas just south of Copenhagen. Look left, and all you can see are swans, lakes, and grass.

Unfortunately, look right and all you can see is the Nuclear power station!

As Brondby turned out not to be as close to the s-Tog as we'd planned, we've got plenty of exercise yomping into town!

You have to watch what you're doing round here. In the UK its common to come across pot markers - floating (unlit) bouys dropped by fishermen, but they don't have ropes between them and its possible to sail right through - here, they have areas reserved for netting, where the things are connected together. These, it conspires, are marked on the paper chart, but not on the electronic plotter!

We amused ourselves for a while plane spotting. The track ran right under Copenhagen airport approach. Half way across the sound, we encountered a plague of flies. They covered anything vaguely white (including us).

Then we saw a tug towing what looks like the product of a large forest on a barge. We didn't get close enough to see what held all these logs on, but we'd just had a Navtex message saying that a 10m log was floating around somwhere....

To cap a lovely day, we picked a mooring box in Malmo between two fairly large yachts. We knew it would be a tight fit, as the poles were quite close together, but I didn't allow for the screws sticking out of the Comfortina 35 next door, which took a gash out of our gelcoat.

Hmmm...

After a couple of days R&R in Malmo, we then made for Höllviken, for the Viking Festival. Höllviken is the marina attached to the Falsterbo Canal, a short cut if you are going east. We arrived and didn't like the look of the marina, so after waiting for the bridge (on the hour) we trucked on to Gislövesläge, a small hamlet outside Trelleborg. We the witnessed then spectacle of a ferry trucking backwards up the whole entrance channel, presumably because there was no room to turn inside the harbour.

And then we met our first Brit - Derek from the Isle of Wight.