The wind finally shifted around from the north in the night and we decided to make use of it to go out to Björkskär in the outer archipelago in the hope of seeing some seals as well as the eerily exposed outer islands. We zipped along in the sunshine at a stonking pace – over 7 knots – when Wolfgang spotted a dinghy bobbing along all on its lonesome. Lots of the boats here pull dinghies along behind them, like baby ducks paddling in their mother’s wake. It means you can still get shore if you anchor in the middle of a bay rather mooring up against a rock (once again, the Swedes have useful single words for these concepts – svajankring and landförtöjning). We’ve been debating the pros and cons of buying one ourselves, the chief con being the expense, so the skipper immediately determined that we should salvage this one. Under his command. the maneouvre was executed with such perfection that on our first pass he managed to hook it with the boathook – whereupon we looked up and saw a sailing boat anxiously motoring towards us full of vigorously waving people. It was quite clearly the dinghy’s owners who had returned to look for their lost baby duckling. By rights of salvage, I believe the dinghy technically belonged to us from the moment Wolfgang got his boathook in under the seat and started to drag it with us, but we are crap pirates. We waved back and abandoned the dinghy to its former owners (who, I might mention, made a complete pig’s ear of retrieving it under motor, compared with our swift and elegant manouevre under sail).
We didn’t get to Björkskär in the end because it clouded over and we decided to head for Gällnö instead, where we did landförtöjning in a bay we’d never been to before, neatly tucked it in behind a protective wall of rock, just as the rain started. But as Wolfgang has already put up the only photo we took today, I shall end here.
(Wolfgang) Not true, I took some more photos. And here is a pic of Akka in the lovely bay at Gällnö.
