Blog 14 Kalmar, Mönsterås, Sandvik

A well earned rest day at Kalmar having battled high winds to get here, however the sun was shining for most of the time making it bearable but difficult to photograph many spectacular flocks of eider duck as they all took off up wind ( spray on the lens ) and into the sun, meanwhile an eagle with wings like barn doors had passed across our stern before I had the camera out and ready - too late, just imagine it.

This city with history we are told, the castle is like new, in fact we saw a man with what looked like a feather duster brushing the fortified parapets - actually I think he was clearing grass and weeds but it is all so tidy with parkland and wonderful tree planting - some superb old species but I bet it wasn't like that in 1500 or whenever. It was around then that Sweden broke away from their "EU" with Denmark and Norway and thought they could do better on their own - sounds familiar. Music struck up in the evening and - how charming - passing couples were joining in to dance in the open air on the harbour board walk, both ballroom and jive, it made me feel good, although we did only watch.

There is a superb and helpful chandlery near Kalmar harbour which we were about to leave when the chart plotter sofware had a tantrum and sat down, even the highest tech cure all of switching off and on did nothing to make it recover. You need to know that sailing in these rock strewn shallow areas without all the navigational aids working would be an extremely silly thing to do - fortunately the owner of the chandlery did not hesitate to ring Raymarine Sweden and get them to talk him through a total factory re-install which did the trick - a good man that.

The late start threw out our calculations of a trouble free trip on the way to Monsteras and worrying afternoon thunderclouds were already chasing up behind us by the time we entered the final one hour long fjord. The beauty of the many wooded inlets and islets we passed was partly lost with concentrting on navigating between the rocks, donning waterproofs just in case, hoisting in sails and wondering what lightning would do for the newly invigourated chart plotter - and us come to that.

We survived yet again - an interesting little town at the end of a fjord where thousands of salmon come to spawn and tourists to fish. I was surprised to find something rather special in the chunky church with a wood plank barrel ceiling, just walk in and there it is - a latin bible of 1522 printed in Nuremberg- a back to basics edition of the Lutheran persuasion with Hebrew text in the margin. What history that has seen in its time.

Fog on the following morning meant we only caught misty glimpses of the lovely fjord on our way out and crossing to Oland, wondered if more people were relying on AIS to avoid collision in fog than on radar - we had both but spent some time seeing if we could "acquire" targets on the radar which we had already seen on AIS.

Sandvik on Oland is an old fishing harbour and - no surprises - sell smoked fish, excellent. The island seems to be a haven for wild flowers which survive on the glacial debris which makes up most of the land here. Vast stretches of colour springing from endless rows of broken grey stones laying metres thick on limestone bedrock which is exposed at the shoreline and reveals countless fossils of razor shells and trilobites. There were so many species I could only choose a few to paint later in the day when the rain came.

The wind has gone away for a few days - the sea today was like a lake of oil, mirror flat and slowly pulsating and the boat wash trailing behind for miles in to the distance.