Getting a wiggle on...

At the end of our last blog post I said we were off to have a look around Oskarshamn.

Fortuitously our visit coincided with the weekly gathering of classic cars. There were a couple of old 2 door Volvos from the etcha-sketch school of design (no idea why anyone would want to preserve one of those boxes, but I suppose this is Sweden!) and quite a number of yank tanks. I'm always impressed by the total impracticality of the latter. 8 litre V8 engines, 50 foot long, and yet only 2 doors and very little legroom for any rear seat passengers! Marvellous. So much better than the oh so practical boxes people drive around in today. 

Feast your eyes on these:

Hadn't heard of this one. 4 door pillarless saloon

Don't ya just love that face?

Worth a close up!

Just 2 doors and look at the length of that boot!

Maybe not quite as stylish, but still totally impractical

A Mustang with the bonnet up. Have to have a look!

If you were wondering if British cars were represented, you need wait no longer. Feast your eyes on this...

Spilt windscreen Morris Oxford. There's an engine in there somewhere!

Another day and time to move on again. But first, no doubt you've all been concerned about the fate of my fingers (yeah, right!). So here's a picture of them, suitably dressed:

Poor Rob!

It's now over a week since I damaged them and they're well on the way to mending but still hurt. All together "Poor Rob!" (as if anyone cares...).

Our next destination was scheduled to be a small harbour I'd spotted on the chart called Revsudden. This was about 10 miles north of Kalmar which we'd visited back in 2015.

Big house on a small island. I thought this was a ship from a distance. I'm sure I saw it move!

However, when we arrived at the harbour it became obvious that it had been designed for smaller boats. There was no way we could fit into any of the vacant berths, so we had no option but to move on to Kalmar.

Bridge from mainland Sweden to Oland, just north of Kalmar

Can you guess where this is?

Fortunately Kalmar had plenty of space and we tied up comfortably between two booms. We were then entertained by some floating evangelists who motored around in the boat pictured below delivering a brief sermon and singing! Their singing was actually really good, including stuff such as "How Great Thou Art" (that was one of Rhydian's wasn't it?!).

Floating evangelists at Kalmar

We stayed just the one night in Kalmar as we'd been there before. Then it was off once again - this time to the small harbour of Kristianopel.

Kalmar castle from the water

Kristianopel was a lovely little place, described in our Cruising Association notes as "Not just roses around the door, but over the roof too!". There were certainly a lot of flowers about and, as with most (or maybe all) of the towns we've been to in Sweden, it was immaculate.

Cyclone in Kristianopel harbour

For some reason, the harbour master didn't put anyone near us for quite a while

View from Kristianopel's harbour wall

Kristianopel shop

Kristianopel street scene

The ravishes of the Swedes throughout the province of Blekinge in the 16th century had revealed the weaknesses of the Danish border defences (this area was still part of Denmark at the time) and so Kristianopel was planned and built as a fortified town. It wasn't great for the inhabitants at the time of construction of the fortifications though. Not only did they have to contribute money and horses, they also had to transport 60 massive blocks of hewn stone each to the site. To top it all, soldiers were billeted with the locals too! Unsurprisingly, many voted with their feet...

Fortified caravan site at Kristianopel

Early warning signal, perhaps?

Oo er... I didn't think you could measure it!

Kristianopels's 17th century church

It was unusual inside

We stayed at Kristianopel for a couple of nights but, with a forecast of strong westerly winds for a few days (the opposite to what we wanted to make progress west) we decided to take advantage of a day of very light adverse winds and move on to Karlskrona.

There's a big ship entrance to Karlskrona and also a back door route that saves quite a few miles. Our charts were not large enough scale to actually show a channel deep enough for Cyclone to fit through on the latter, but our pilot book and a couple of locals we spoke to said we'd be fine... So we went for it. 

In practice there were lots of leading marks marking the narrow channels for us. These are great. Basically there are 2 posts some distance apart with shapes on the top of them. As long as one shape is directly above the other, you're safely in the channel. Obviously this only applies up to a point - they're mounted on land - so you have to know when to turn off the line!

Leading marks - the triangles. They're one above the other, so we're in the channel...

... which is great, as it helps us avoid these!

More archipelago (yawn!)

The approach to Karlskrona

Karlskrona has been a naval town for centuries and this is very clear from much of its architecture. The map we were given at the harbour office had a suggested walking route on it, so off we went!

Strange man in silly hat

Statue with seagull in Hoglands park. Note weird people in background...

The Great Square

The Town Hall

The Church of the Holy Trinity...

... which had an impressive dome (rather like myself!)

One of the main shopping streets. They'd got the flags out for us

Ship in the Marinmuseum

Entrance to the Marinmuseum. We'll come back to that

A close up of one of the exhibits

Looking out over the archipelago

Weird slide! Kids go in the ear and come out of the neck. Old cyberman?

Ahhh! That's what she is!!

Why the wide doors? Seaplane hangars

Guns through the ages. These are on Bastion Kungshall

View over Karlskrona's waterfront

Looking back to Bastion Kungshall

Kungsbron's Bastion Aurora (in distance)...

... and closer to

The Admiralty Church

The Clock Tower in the Admiralty Park

View over Karlskrona from Stakholmen - a great lump of rock in the water

If you were reading the photo captions carefully, you'd have noticed I'd said we'd come back to the Marinmuseum. Well now we are and, er, we did. Why? Because when I looked it up on the internet I discovered that admission was free! We like free things, so on our second day in Karlskrona we went inside. The exhibit with top billing was a submarine from the Cold War era. You could go inside this too.

Cold War sub

Mine laying sub from an earlier period

There were also ships outside to visit - although visits were generally restricted to the deck areas - and other exhibitions such as the shed of small naval boats pictured below:

Naval small boats

You could have spent a very long time in the museum but we were content to just have a quick wander through. After all, we didn't have to get our money's worth!

After 3 nights in Karlskrona we set off for the small harbour of Kaseberga on the south coast of Sweden. The forecast suggested that this would be a motorsail and it was. The strong westerly winds we'd had for 3 days had blown themselves out and left just light and variable winds behind them. Still, at least we could make progress and, following yet another 0600 departure, we arrived in Kaseberga - a distance of 66 miles - just after 2000.

Fort guarding the main route into Karlskrona

A particularly good picture of me!

Nearing Kaseberga. Good sea views for the owners of those houses

Kaseberga had been described as a picturesque Cornish type harbour and that turned out to be an apt description. There was one boat length space remaining against the wall when we arrived, near to the slipway. There was a warning on the slipway wall that depth at that location was just 1m, but we were assured by an unknown passer-by (always a good source of information I find) that there would be sufficient depth for us in the available space in front of it.

With some trepidation we approached the wall very, very slowly until - you've guessed it! - bonk! We hit something solid with our keel. So we paid the passer-by back by rafting up to his boat for the night!

Kaseberga harbour. Pretty, ain't it?

Kaseberga is famous for the Ale's Stones and Kasehuvud. There's info in the picture below if you can zoom in enough, but basically the Ale's Stones is Sweden's largest preserved stone ship. Stone ships were often built during the Viking era, between 800 and 1050AD and recent analysis suggests that the Ale's Stones were erected some time between 500 and 1000AD - so they don't really know when then!

A bit like Stone Henge, it's all about alignment with the sun at midsummer and the equinoxes and stuff.

Info board

Our first sighting of the stones

There's a lot of 'em

I wouldn't have wanted to carry them up that hill!

We saw the people in this picture taking a selfie and so...

... Arrgghh! We did too!

Sunset over the stones

We only planned to spend one night at Kaseberga as we were due a day of strongish easterlies which (a) would speed us on our way towards the island of Mon in Denmark, and (b) would make the harbour of Kaseberga very uncomfortable as it was open to the east.

So it was up at 0530 once again for an 0600 departure (Mon was another 65 miles away). Being considerate types, we tiptoed over our neighbours decks to unplug our electricity cable and silently removed our shorelines so that we were ready to depart. All that remained was for Jo to pull the bow of our boat towards theirs before slipping her line, at which point I would motor silently (well, ish!) backwards and away.

It would have worked great too - if I hadn't left the spring line (a line between our boat and the other that stops us moving backwards and forwards relative to it) connected! Doh!!

After dragging our neighbour's boat backwards and then forward I realised what I'd done and quickly removed the line before we made a hasty exit. No harm was done, but I'm afraid we didn't achieve our objective of not waking the neighbours. I saw them appear in their cockpit to wave us off as we approached the harbour exit...

To their credit, they even managed a smile!

It was a fairly rough, but quite quick, sail to Mon. We covered the 64 miles in 11.5 hours, an average of 5.6 Knots berth to berth.

Approaching Mon

Another shot of Mon

Klintholm harbour

We'd moored next to a rather grumpy Dane on arrival - or perhaps he just never said much - and unfortunately had to be up by 0800 the next day to enable them to leave. We could have really done with a lie in after 2 days of early starts and long sails.

Having moved to allow Mr. Grumpy to leave, we moored to an alongside pontoon just inside the harbour wall. This gives us great uninterrupted views over the sea and along the coast and it's from there that I'm writing this (in the orangery). 

We've had a day off sailing today, but tomorrow it's another 60 odd miles to an anchorage that we visited on our way east. After that, it's just a day sail back to Laboe and thence the northern entrance to the Kiel Canal. 

Since leaving Tallinn on 2nd July, we've covered 600 miles to date (21st July). As I said in the title to this post, we've been getting a wiggle on!

Thanks for reading.