Aspö is another small island only 11 residents, we had intended to use there mooring but it did not have any buoys to tie up to so we elected to free anchor in the bay. We went ashore but dinghy and had a good walk round, after we returned there were a couple of people playing folk music, it sounded good coming across the water.

Jurmo had been recommended to us by some Finnish sailors as there favourite island. It was owned and run by Sweden for 300 years then Russia for 100. When the swedes had it, it was a pirate island. The Pirates used the trees to light fires to lure sailing ships to crash ashore, then they robbed them just as was done in Cornwall. The authorities got fed up with this so every tree and bush was burned to the ground. There are still very few trees. Another lovely day...

Borstö ( snake Island ) even before we had gone ashore we had been warned about the islands snake population and had seen 2 swimming near to the yachts. Apparently there are grass snakes and Vipers, the vipers are actually adders, the largest one was about 3 feet long, so with tales of air lifts to hospital in helicopters if bitten we set of to walk round the island in our leather sea boots. We saw 4 in total with the big one living under the end of the jetty....

After two nights in Hanko getting washing and shopping done we were ready to head out into the islands again. We chose this as it was a lovely big anchorage, the weather seamed to have improved so we decided to have a few days just sailing short distances less than 20 miles. This fitted the bill perfectly. On route we passed a white headed Eagle sat on a huge nest.

Hanko is another large town, pop 12000. Two reasons for coming here. 1 it's hard to avoid being on the route along the bottom of Finland and 2 its got a train station. Our crew for the last week John and Marieanne we due to fly home from Helsinki. On the route down we had fog for about 2 hours causing some fun trying to blow the fog horn. Marieanne won that award. The town has a number of huge Russian wooden villas and has been a spa town since 1874 when it was...