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A Scandinavian Sailing Odyssey - How we sailed our Albin Vega in Norway, Sweden & Denmark - Part 2
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Oct 21, 2022
After eleven days of sailing from Oslo, Norway, and with stops down along the Swedish west coast, we got the Kullen lighthouse up on our port side. Check out this second part of our sailing adventure, as we sail with dolphins, spend time in Helsingør, and visit the Scandinavian islands Anholt in Denmark and Koster in Sweden. We hope you enjoy watching this sailing odyssey. Please hit the like button and leave a comment. Thanks for watching! Gabrielle & Pål ============================= Follow Me: ============================= https://www.norwaywithpal.com https://www.facebook.com/norwaywithpal https://www.instagram.com/norwaywithpal/ ============================= Gear Used to Make This Video: ============================= ○ Main camera - https://amzn.to/3pPvsCJ
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After having sailed from Oslo, Norway, it stops down along the Swedish West coast, in the evening of day 11, we got the Kudan Lighthouse
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up on our port side. This lighthouse is the strongest one in Scandinavia and can be seen as far as 27 nautical miles away
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Kullun also marks the entrance to the Eurys Sun Strait, which separates Sweden and Denmark
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Seeing Kulun always gives me the feeling of having sailed far, but at this time also a bitter
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sweet feeling that we soon would have to turn back. We moored for the night in a small town called Viken on the Swedish side, and we could look over the strait to the Danish side and the Cromborg castle on the horizon
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For a couple of days we did what sailors often do. Wait for the weather to calm down
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As a nice end to our stay in Sweden, we got a visit from some friends who live nearby
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and on day 13 we started to sail over to Helsinghur. The Uresund Strait, which connects the North Sea with the Baltic Sea, is one of the
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the most heavily trafficked waterways in the world. You can either cross the Strait with a
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bridge between Malmue and Copenhagen or you can take a short ferry ride going between
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Helsingbor on the Swedish side and Helsinghur on the Danish side. As we got closer to
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Helsinger the Kronborg castle grew bigger and bigger, best known for presumably being the castle
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that Shakespeare had in mind for his famous play Hamlet. Suddenly we started hearing splashing and blowing sounds around us
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and in turn out a pot of dolphins had come to swim with us
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Wow! After tying up in the guest harbor, it was time to hoist the Danish cortisy flag
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We got a visit from some good Danish friends and spent the day exploring the castle and the surroundings
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We watched the current down in the strait running fast in the line of fishermen were catching nice sized macriles
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I guess it explains the dolphins earlier in the day. Denmark is a country of beautiful beaches and that is where we chose to spend our first and last evening in Helsinger before it was time
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to head north again the next day. It's early morning 6 o'clock but we've been out for an hour already
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Today we are saying goodbye to Helsinger and we're sailing along the Danish coast here now
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and we are aiming for the island of Amholt where we are supposed to arrive in roughly
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10 to 12 hours. It's a pretty good wind today. It's south southwesterly wind flowing at around 14 knots so I think it's going to be a very
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enjoyable day of sailing. It turned out to be a pretty gray day and except for some big ships over in the shipping lane and
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this one's sailboat we did not see much except for ocean all around us
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We enjoyed plenty of hot chocolate though and for lunch we had open-faced sandwiches
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on fresh Danish rye bread. Finally after 13 hours at sea we had the unholt island coming up on our starboard site
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We had never been at Anhalt this time of the year before, so we were not sure what to expect
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It turned out however that there are two weeks every year when the harbor is completely packed
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and that happened to be now. Boats were crammed together, sometimes in creative ways, and we ended up alongside along the
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the dock as boat number five of a total of six. By tying up long side to the dock, it means
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we are all tied up to each other, as you can see in this illustration. This arrangement leads
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to that whenever someone is arriving or someone is leaving in the morning, all the other boats
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need to move accordingly. It's actually a fun everyday event, especially to observe Swedes
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Danes, Norwegians and Germans trying to communicate together in five different languages
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including some English. It usually goes without a hitch though, and it's a great way to get to know your neighbor
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However, sometimes there is some drama, like this boat hitting ground. Luckily, the harbor master came and pushed him off
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The Anholt Island is 7 miles long and about 4 miles wide
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There are two villages with about 150 permanent residents. But during the summer season, from the end of June to the first half of August, as many as 50,000 people visit
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transforming the otherwise sleepy island to a busy place with restaurants and shops open
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There are not many cars on the island and the best way to explore is on a rental bike
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This island is just beautiful and we rented bikes and we're going to go out and explore
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and it's just beautiful scenery. There's pine forest. There's a desert and they also have pretty good Vinebrou, Danish bread
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We started by biking out to a beach on the east side of the island
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We enjoyed some fresh lemonade while enjoying the sun, the sand, the warm wind and the ocean
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When it was time for lunch we biked into the Amholt town
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A cute little place where the locals were selling various things along the road
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Like for instance, Anholt potatoes picked the same day. We stopped by the island church with ships hanging from the island
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ships hanging from the ceiling, possibly to show gratitude for the sailors returning from sea
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As we got hungry, we had some smoke trims and salmon from the local fish store
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The eastern part of the island has an area named Urken, the desert. It's not a true desert
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but a fairly flat shrubland with small sandy hills, shud. shaped by the wind
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This area has never been cultivated, so the topography is more or less the same as it was
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10,000 years ago at the end of the ice age. The desertification here was caused by deforestation during the Napoleonic Wars when they needed
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large amounts of timber to build ships. We went for a walk to enjoy the calm ambience, with only the sound of grasshoppers
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the wind and the ocean far away. Where's a good guy
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Where's a good guy? Huh? Ha? Ha! We had planned to stay two nights at Arnold, but we ended up
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But we ended up staying four. We just couldn't leave this place
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On the morning of day 18, we motored out of the Anholed harbor
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For the first time during the trip, we now felt that we were on our way home
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and that the sailing adventure was coming to an end. But before that, there were still some nautical miles left to cover
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On this day, we were going to sail over to the Swedish coast
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long day of sailing crossing the strait of Kattegat. We started with a good wind coming from
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the south About midday we got the wind straight from behind so we sailed wing Notice the preventer rope going from the back of the boom and forward This keeps the boom in place so that it won flip across the cockpit and hit any heads
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Later in the day, the southern wind picked up, and we had some
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Later in the day, the southern wind picked up and we had some enjoyable hours of sailing before reaching the Swedish coast in the late evening
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We were not planning on spending a lot of time along the Swedish coast
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So after a night on anchor, a night on buoy, in the evening of an epic sunset
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we sailed some long days until we reached the Swedish island of Kostur just before the Norwegian border
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Kostur consists of two larger main islands, and on the south side there are hundreds of smaller islands and rocks providing good protection
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against the ocean waves. Here and there you find areas well suited for tying up and spending the night
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It's a perfect example of what we Norwegian call Utthaven, out harbor
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A typical way to moor here is longside along the rocks. You basically find a fairly steep rock wall with a good depth under the water
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you put a lot of fenders out and pull some ropes on land
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To be able to fasten the ropes you can tie them around the rock
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Or if there are no rocks nearby you can hammer in some wedges
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We enjoyed exploring these small islands giving a reminder of how the glaciers once
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Inhabited these lands and carved out this landscape as they started to retract at the end of the ice age
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A flock of sheep are spending the summers here cutting the grass and
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and socializing with the sailors. We knew the end of our trip was nearing
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and so we installed ourselves for a final West Coast sunset. We brought our foldable chairs, a wool blanket
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and a thermos of hot chocolate, and sat there, watching the first-golder
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the sun disappearing under the horizon and reminiscing back to a great sailing adventure
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Ending the trip on Kostur would have been perfect, but we still had one more day of sailing to reach our home harbor in Iceland
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in Oslo. And if you look carefully under the cloud on the right, you can see the shape of the
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outer Oslo floor. And before we knew it, we were cruising up the fjord with a nice southerly
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wind. And after a long day at sea, the sun set and just before midnight we reached Oslo
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