Tornseglare meets svalor
A little short of vacation time this year, we decided to take a few extra days to sail down south to Skanör, to enjoy the Swedish Riviera, and ideally to sale back at the end of the weekend
. The weather seemed perfect; on Thursday the wind was out of the east, followed by two days of calm weather and then wind from the south west on Sunday; perfect for us to sail home from.
We stayed Wednesday night on the boat so that we would be ready to go early Thursday morning and to catch the good weather. Since I had been the one out of Harbor every time, we decided to switch things up and for Kim to steer us in and out of harbor, while I would take the role of Hoppy Land Kalle.
After a pleasant night on Tornseglare, we started getting ready and leaved the first thing of the trip: what we thought had been a gas pump at Dockan in fact a waste disposal site. Thankfully we had plenty of fuel, but it is a bit unfortunate that there isn’t a place to fuel up at Dockan.
The wind was forecast to be around 5 m/s. However, when we got out of the harbor, a mix of higher than expected waves and higher than expected winds led us to learn why Kalle had hello said “if you think you should reef then reef”; reefing at sea in waves of over half a meter is a bit of a challenge.
Once we had that sorted, sails went up and if we went. Kim handled her first pass under the bridge excellently (which was weird as always), and the rest from there on to Skanör was nearly perfect: wind abeam and steady, mostly calm seas and clearing skies.
As we pulled up to the harbor, I noticed that there were many masts visible. Many. It seems that Skanör is a bit of a summer destination for Danes and Germans alike, and as we came in we found a packed harbor with boats upon boats parked every which way. Thankfully they have active harbor employees who guided us to a good spot up against a historic life boat at the end of the last channel.
We then had two pretty magical days of sand, sun, swimming, good food, drinks and surprising company.
So what have we learned on this trip? Well, for starters you may have noted that I haven’t described the sail back. We got up this morning, prepped the boat, and… failed to start the motor. Again. It being a July weekend in Sweden, it is not particularly easy to get a mechanic, and so Kim will stay out tonight and try to get someone to look at the motor tomorrow. The lesson here: maybe should have actually taken the motor in when we first saw signs of trouble.
On the second morning, we got to witness a delightful hermit crab-like exchange of boat spots:
We ended up moving in the midst of this to an actual slip instead of next to a boat. We were able to tow ourselves in backwards into the spot, which was great, but what we (re-) learned was that we should not rush things; we had never parked a boat in backwards, and it turns out we would have been better served by planning our actions in advance to ensure that everything was safe and certain.
We also were reminded that it is a small world—while getting dinner, someone called out my name, who turned out to be a colleague from grad school who we had last seen at our wedding in 2018. We had a lovely evening, watched the sun set, and were reminded of the joy of sharing our boat with friends.
Finally, we learned that swallows are terrible teenagers. We saw a group of ungrateful little birds fly the coop, and then spend the rest of the time sitting around, doing nothing but complain that they weren’t being fed enough by their thankless mother. Rude.
