It rained all night and it rained all day, so we abandoned the plan to head for the outer islands and instead Wolfgang worked – wrapped in a blanket we inherited from Anders, the previous owner – and I lay in bed in wrote Wimseyfic and played sudoku, and a vast quantity of peanuts was consumed along with endless cups of coffee (you have to go outside and walk all the way to the prow and turn off the gas in the little hideyhole where the bottles are stored, so to justify not going out and turning off the gas we had to keep using the stove to make coffee).
At last, however, the rain stopped for long enough to look as if this might be a permanent arrangement, so we went on shore and walked through the dripping forest along a lovely clear track, past the walkers’ hostel (a sweet little red wooden building) and the guest harbour (a sweet little jetty), to the krog, which is also very charming and located in a manor built on the site of a slott that the Russian burned down in 1719. The Russians did a lot of burning down in 1719. They tried to conquer Sweden and decided the best way to do that was to burn down all the farms and fishing harbours in the archipelago, where the poor farmers and fishermen were already struggling to eke a living under almost impossible conditions, and if the occasional historic slott presented itself for burning, who were they to pass up such an opportunity? 
The invasion failed and the Russian withdrew, leaving behind them many stone bread ovens out in the woods which today constitute one of the highlights of a visit to the archipelago, with excited wooden signs all over the place pointing visitors towards a russenugn. They are actually rather wonderful historical curiosities, but it’s hard not to feel short-changed when you hike for miles through the forest only to end up at a small heap of stones. But I digress, 
The chap who built the new manor on the site of the now defunct slott was a former peasant who ran away to sea, made a fortune as a captain in the East India Company and returned home to thumb his nose at his previous master by building a luxury establishment where his palace had once stood. As a peasant, he wasn’t actually entitled to own a manor, so it had to be in someone else’s name at first, but he eventually managed to persuade the powers that be to grant him the rights of a freeman. My admiration and sympathy for this social upstart proto-Lopachin, meting out an elegant revenge, was stopped in its tracks by the discovery that he then, ate the age of 58, married the daughter of the local priest, who was 16 at the time. I can only hope he died shortly after, leaving her to enjoy the fruits of her father’s investment.
The hoi polloi now drink, eat and frolic in the manor grounds, where there is a very nice outdoor bar, although we only sampled the tea and coffee owing to the outrageous cost of alcohol in Sweden.. By the time we went back to the boat, the sun had come out and the sky was busy turning bright blue, so we sat outside in the cockpit drinking red wine and compensating for having made a pig’s ear of our own landing by watching other people fuck up theirs (I almost fell in the water trying to jump on shore with the rope and ended up wrapped around Akka’s nose like a monkey, and when Wolfgang came ashore with the second line, the string from his pocket knife got caught and he also almost fell in). There were no wrecks and nobody drownded, though, so we ate supper outside and now I’m writing this and Wolfgang is washing up. Tomorrow, I hope, we will make it to the outer islands, although since the Skipper keeps gloomily prognosticating rain, we shall have to see. It’s hard to believe right now that it will ever rain again, the sky is so innocently blue, as if it had never ever crossed it’s little mind that that there could be such a thing as rain, let alone thunderbolts and lightning.