A harbour master in Estonia put it so eloquently by saying “This is a shit summer”! He was right actually. Having spent our summer holidays in Sweden for almost 10 years now, I think this was the coldest we ever had. We had a lot of sun but we did not get those hot summer days that we had in the past. 🙂
We loved the exploring of new parts of the Baltic and will be back to Finland and Estonia in the years to come. The long-ish stretches of sailing was great (for me) and bearable (for Victoria). It made us curious about further distances. Actually I would love to go all the way to St. Petersburg (but am somewhat reluctant as to bureaucracy and logistic hurdles), Riga, Danzig, Kopenhagen and the German Hanse-Städte have also their attraction and I hear that the west-cost of Sweden has also a lot going for. A hop to Oslo? The bucket list is large and I am sure we won’t get bored soon.
The Finnish islands are just amazing and you can spend years exploring the thousands of nooks and crannies and we loved spending a week in Helsinki. But Estonia was a revelation and we are already planning a sailing/biking holiday there very soon.
It was also a windy summer which made the sailing just great. There was only 1 day when we used the engine for more than maneuvering in and out of the harbours (we used the engine less than 10%) and most of time we had winds above 15 knots. Especially the north-westerly we had at the beginning was great fun and took us to Helsinki in 3 easy days. But also afterwards we were constantly on the verge of reefing and Akka behaved beautifully in all conditions. She is not a racer and with her 5 1/2 tons a good breeze does her good. In that respect the harbour master was wrong – “It was a great summer”
Her some random pictures from 2017 – It was a great summer!
