Slowly sailing down the west coast of Denmark

We left Hirtshals yesterday morning at 10 o'clock. Any hope we had of maintaining our theoretical 5 knot average vanished instantly as both the wind and the current were on our nose. Even motor-sailing with the main and staysail (because it doesn't make as much noise as the jib when we get too close to the wind), we couldn't quite do 4 knots. On the plus side, with so little wind, there were no uncomfortable waves to deal with.

Finally this morning around 5:30 we got enough wind to turn the engine off and really sail, but except for one squally period, we're barely getting up to 5 knots. Weather forecasts and GRIB files continue to get it wrong here. Oh well, as long as the winds are light, we can deal with them. Our arrival in Helgoland will probably be Friday morning, though, rather than Thursday evening.

-Shirlee

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The Kiel Canal was a great idea

As we get ourselves around the Jutland peninsula and back down to Helgoland, we can appreciate why the Germans built the Kiel Canal. Now that we’re committed to going around, we sort of wish we’d taken the canal back out. But we wanted to sail, and we thought we’d get to do more of that—and less docking—by going around. And we will get to do more sailing. We just have to wait for the right weather window to do it.

Geography lesson: Helgoland is circled in red; the Kiel Canal is drawn in blue; Hirtshals is near the top; Helsingør is where Denmark almost touches Sweden (Click on the map for a larger view.)

Meanwhile, we’re waiting in Hirtshals. The marina here is small and a little primitive, but it’s half the cost of Skagen, and it’s on the west side, so part of the hard part is behind us.

Leaving Helsingør

John is still suffering from the cold or flu that he’s had since we arrived in Helsingør. His fever, which was never very high, is down, but he’s coughing more. Nevertheless, we’re leaving here today and heading out on an overnight passage to the island of Læsø.

Læsø is the biggest island in the Kattegat and the farthest north. We had thought that we would leave here a couple of days ago and anchor out in the Swedish west coast islands for a couple of nights, but we’re eager to get back to the English Channel and do some exploring there, so we’re pushing on. After a day in Læsø, we hope to catch a weather window to get us through the Skagerrak, into the North Sea, and down to Helgoland without stopping. That’s a three-day sail. We have identified harbors where we can duck in if we get too tired or if the weather changes.

Castle from the town side across the moat

We haven’t done much in Helsingør except rest, but we did manage to get to the castle the other day. We were right on time to catch two tours in English. The first tour was of the casements, the area beneath the walls, and included Holger the Dane. Legend has it that this sleeping medieval warrior will awake to save Denmark when the time comes. The other tour was of the royal chambers and ballroom. The ballroom was the site of a display of modern royal tapestries, which seemed to annoy the guide, but we liked it.

Statue of Holger the Dane in the casements

Ballroom with tapestry exhibit

After the tours we also visited the maritime museum there, went up in one of the towers, and wandered around some more. It’s a really big castle with a great view and important history as guardian of the narrow passage (4 km) between Denmark and Sweden. Before the Kiel Canal, this was the primary entrance to the Baltic, and it still sees lots of traffic from big ships.

Castle lighthouse as seen from the tower

Cannons guarding the strait (they still work)

Taking a break in Helsingør

John is under the weather, so we’re taking a break today and staying on the boat instead of going to see the castle as we had planned. That gives me a chance to catch up on the blog. We hope to see the castle tomorrow before we leave.

Copenhagen

We found the marina at Kastrup Strandpark near the Copenhagen airport a pleasant and convenient place to stay for a few days, both as a base to visit Copenhagen and as a place to do some work on the boat. I won’t bore the non-sailors with the details of this little-known marina, but I will write it up for the Seven Seas Cruising Association so other sailors will know about it.

One of our first sights in Copenhagen was this military group marching down the street in traffic in full dress.

Our first day in Copenhagen we bought a day pass for the DFDS Canal Tours and hop-off/hop-on canal buses. That gave us an overview of the city and a nice sea breeze to cool us off. Yes, we did see the Little Mermaid statue. In fact, we walked all along the harbor area there and also saw the polar bear statue and two impressive fountains. Did you know there’s also a statue of a merman and his family? A woman passenger on the canal tour told us about it, so we went to see it too. It’s in the water by the Højbro at Ved Stranden in the Gammel Strand area.

The little mermaid and American friends

Trekroner Fortress is only accessible by boat. It's on the DFDS green route.

Location of merman statue circled in blue

The next day we started by climbing to the top of Vor Frelsers Kirke (Our Savior's Church), which we learned about on our tour the day before, for a view of the city. It was spectacular and well worth climbing the 400 steps. I’m glad we started with that, though, because I don’t think I would have had the energy later.

View from Our Savior's Church

From there we went to Christiania, Copenhagen’s hippy town. John had heard of it before, but I learned about it from our friends Lex and Maria. Maria wrote about it in her blog last summer. It was a beautiful day, but I confess didn’t find Christiania appealing. John had a beer and I had some ice cream, and then we set off to find the Geological Museum.

To get to the museum, we got back on the metro or subway. We had purchased a three-zone klippenkort (a 10-ride public transportation card that can be shared) to get from the marina to the city and back, but we didn't want to waste it on a one-zone trip. At the ticket machine, all I could find was two- and three-zone tickets, so we shrugged and concluded that one zone was free like fareless square in Portland. (We learned later that it’s a two-zone minimum, not free, but by then we were headed out of town anyway.)

The Geological Museum was pretty good. It had several exhibitions that were in both Danish and English, and we appreciated that. They included some interesting multimedia displays about meteorites and asteroids. We had hoped to visit more museums in Copenhagen, but by the time we wandered through the botanical gardens to get to the Geological Museum and then spent some time there, it was getting late, so we just went to a brewpub called Brew Pub and then home. On the first day we visited the Museum of Danish Resistance (1940-1945). It was quite impressive, and admission was free.

Botanical gardens

The next two days we worked on the boat. Oh, the glamor of cruising. Most of the 4^th of July we spent motoring from Kastrup to Helsingør. There was no wind until we were almost at the castle, and then it was against us. What a busy place the waterway between Helsingør (Denmark) and Helsingborg (Sweden) is! We had to turn off our course to let four ferries go by—three going one way and one the other. Plus, there were lots of pleasure craft out on a hot Saturday afternoon.

We haven’t decided where we’ll go when we leave here. So much depends on the weather at this point. I’ve plotted out a route that takes us to Sweden and one that doesn’t. I guess it will just be a surprise to everyone.

Continuing our story from Sweden

It’s been almost two weeks since I’ve posted. Sorry about that. A lot has been going on. Below is an update in reverse chronological order.

Kivik, Sweden

For most of the past week we’ve been guests of our friends David and Gunilla McCune in a village (Södra Mellby) near Kivik, Sweden. (See our Web site for a little more about David and Gunilla.) They have a wonderful old house called the Love Nest that they offer friends as a guesthouse. David and Gunilla have been great hosts, and we’ve been lucky to see so much of southern Sweden that most people would miss or not even know existed.

The Love Nest

Yesterday we visited the studio of a local artist, Bo Hultén, who lives on an estate that includes an arboretum with 3,000 trees from all over the world. The trees were collected and planted by an Englishman in the early 1900s, and the property is now under the stewardship of Bo and one of the Swedish universities. It’s open to the public, but Bo gave us a tour. He has the only redwood in Sweden, and it looked quite healthy.

The original plan was to move Solstice from the harbor at Simrishamn, about 20 minutes from here by car, to Kivik harbor. However, significant northeasterly winds developed and Kivik is exposed from that direction. So in addition to being our tour guide and translator, David was also our chauffeur back and forth to the boat as we took care of repairs and checked the fenders and such. We really can’t thank him enough for all he’s done to help us.

Windmill near Gunilla's farm

Hornbæk, Denmark

From Hundige we took the train to Helsingør where Tom and Tutten Mittler (the parents of friends in Berkeley) met us and drove us to their summer place in Hornbæk. Along the way they showed us the castle at Helsingør that is known as Hamlet’s castle, the harbor in Hornbæk, and the beach. Then they treated us to a great Danish lunch at their place.

Tutten & Tom and the lunch feast

Tom and Tutten had kindly delivered a boat part for us from the States. We really appreciate the favor and their tremendous hospitality on one of the few summer days we had had in the Baltic to that point.

Hundige Havn

We chose this harbor near the town of Greve because from the aerial photos it looked like it had side-ties and it was a nice day-sail from Rødvig. It was also less expensive than other Danish marinas at only 90 kroners a night, and the write-up in the Danish sailing magazine said they had free loaner bikes.

Sailing from Rødvig to Hundige Havn started out great and ended pretty good, but in between we had a squall with winds at 30 knots or more. We had already decided to reef, but when we were jibing out of being hove to, the bail that the preventers and boom vang attach to broke. (Sorry, this is only meaningful to sailors.) Now we have to figure out how to get that fixed too. (David and Gunilla helped us take care of this in Kivik.)

When we arrived at Hundige we discovered a new floating dock that didn’t show on the aerial photo, harbor sketch, Google Earth, or our charts. It had slips with green signs (meaning they’re available), so we took one and set off to find the harbormaster. We found the office, but they close at 3 p.m. on Fridays, and it was already four o’clock. They have a nice self-serve check-in machine, though, that takes credit cards and provides a card for the electrical service. The card supposedly also opens the restrooms, but we never found them locked. The showers were nice—and free—and although we thought we had to pay for the electricity, it turned out that we didn’t. The card was needed to get it started, but the machine refunded our electricity money when we turned it in.

Since we left Hundige on Monday, we never did see the harbormaster. The office is closed on the weekends and Mondays. So we didn’t get to borrow bikes, which would have been nice because it’s a hike to the store. In fact, we spoke to only one person at the marina the whole long weekend, and that was a guy who was working on his boat in a slip near us.

For those who may follow behind us, there’s a Lidl up the road at Ishoj and a small market a little closer the other way on the road. A local bus runs along the main beach road from Køge to Friden. I’m not sure how you buy tickets for it. We walked to the train station at Hundige and bought a 24-hour all-zone pass for our trip to Hornbæk, so that took care of the bus too.

Rødvig

From Klintholm we sailed past the cliffs of Møn to Rødvig, which is on the same island as Copenhagen and Hornbæk. The island is called Sjælland, which sounds something like “zaylant.” Danish is impossible to pronounce by sounding out the words, or if it isn’t impossible, I haven’t found the key to help me do it.

Tower at Rødvig

Rødvig was good. It’s a cute fishing village, and it was cheaper than Klintholm and had Internet. Plus, we met some nice Dutch people (Sipke and Margriet) from Friesland and enjoyed visiting with them.

Sipke stopped by our boat to ask about the Internet (since we’re Americans, we would know). When I asked the next day if they connected OK, we visited some more and I discovered that he belongs to Rotary and also that he was at the U of O in 1967-69 at the Business School. (It’s a small world, but it’s a bit uncanny how connections with Oregon keep appearing.)

While in Rødvig, we also took the train to Store Heddinge to get a new CF card for John’s camera. That was a little adventure, and now we have photos again.

Landmark tower at Store Heddinge

Klintholm, Denmark

We arrived this morning about 10 o'clock at this little fishing village on the island of Møn after sailing almost all of the way from Neustadt, about 90 nautical miles. The wind was lighter than forecast when we set out and stronger than forecast when we reached Denmark. As the one who had the midnight to 3 a.m. watch, I can now confirm that the sun's glow never completely disappears from the sky here at this time of year.

On the passage we had a good chance to use our new AIS (automatic identification system) receiver and software, which gives us the name, course and speed of commercial traffic and anyone else transmitting AIS information. The software displays the information in a radar view on the computer at the nav station and includes the estimated time and distance for closest approach. Our radar does some of this, but when you're bouncing around on the waves, the images bounce and closest approach info from our radar is next to useless.

Sadly, the compact flash disk for the camera has failed. The only photos of Lübeck that we'll have are the ones I already posted. We looked at CF disks in Neustadt for the chartplotter (so that we could update its system), but we thought they were too expensive. At the time, we didn't know how much we needed one. Now we'll definitely have to find one in Copenhagen.

We're planning to stay here two nights, but we'll keep checking the weather. The wind has died down from this morning, and my old forecast showed light wind on Wednesday. There's no Internet in this town. The harbormaster says the closest Internet is 16 km away. Good thing we have the short-wave radio to keep in touch.

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Leaving Germany today

We’ve spent more time in Germany than we originally thought we would, mostly because of bad weather, but we’ve enjoyed it here. We have especially liked the small yacht clubs at Büdelsdorf and Bad Schwartau (Stettiner Y-C) where everyone was very nice and helpful to us.

We made it back here to Ancora Marina in Neustadt just ahead of a downpour followed by strong westerly winds. This is a huge marina, but the harbormaster himself came to help us with our lines as we came into the box he’d assigned us. We were grateful for the help!

We’re in the area of the marina farthest from the office where the big boats are. It’s strange to be one of the smallest boats around. People are nice, but not particularly friendly except for Klaus. Klaus has a huge Swan (a 56, I think), and he had spotted John as being from the American boat. Klaus’s English is quite good as he does business all over the world, including in the States, so he gets lots of practice. He bought us drinks last night at the bar, and it was good to hear him say that Klintholm (our first destination in Denmark) was a good place.

In the first 24 hours we were here we had the privilege of observing a phenomenon of the Baltic: the strong wind affects the water level. We had strong westerlies of 30 knots and more, so that moved the water east and we lost two or three feet of water under us. The passerelle, which was pretty level when we docked, developed an ever-greater slope until we took it down altogether the second night because it was too steep to walk. When we got up the next morning, the winds had eased some, the water had come back, and we put the passerelle back out.

It looks like we should have a nice sail to Klintholm later today with 10-15 knots of wind out of the west. At our average 5 knots, we figure it will take 18 hours. We won’t be leaving until early afternoon in case we go faster. We don’t want to get too close to the Danish coast at night because of fishing nets with stakes that you can’t see in the dark. The marina at Klintholm doesn’t claim to have Internet, so we may be out of touch for a few days. We’ll try to get position reports out on the short-wave radio, but that doesn’t always work either.