Curare's Adventures

Back in Canada

We have been back on the west coast of Canada for a little over one month and already last summer's Baltic cruise seems a distant memory. When we last wrote we had said goodbye to Curare in Sweden and were preparing to fly home.

You may remember an earlier post when we discussed the Schengen countries, and the fact that Canadians (and many others) are only allowed to remain for 90 days in each 180 day period. However LE found out that Canada and Denmark have a bi-lateral agreement predating the Schengen rule which in simplicity says that "Canadians are able to remain in Denmark a further 90 days after they have used up their 90 Schengen allowable days". So we took the train to Copenhagen on day 90 of our Schengen stay and remained an extra three days visiting the "world's most livable" city. The weather was beautiful, LE gorged on pickled herring and rye bread, GG enjoyed coffee at some of the numerous hipster establishments, we walked around most of the touristy places, travelled on public transit, saw some awesome architecture, visited old friends and then it was time to leave.

Since setting foot on Canadian soil we have been very busy. GG is spending most of his time on Gabriola Island where he continues to work on the final details of the house construction, mainly cosmetic items, the major construction is finished.  In contrast LE is spending most of her time in Vancouver in a new, very small, condominium close to the waterfront walking paths and numerous expensive restaurants. The unit is larger than Curare, but not by much.

To liven things up a bit we took a road trip to the center of B.C. to look at fall colours and do a little bit of geologic work. Yes WORK! We were very lucky because the end of September can often have nasty weather but we had blue skies and sunshine every day and the yellow trees were beautiful. I wish I could say the same for the area where we were working. A few years ago the forest in central B.C. was infested by the pine beetle and great swaths of pine trees died. Now these trees have fallen over, one on top of the other, creating large piles of logs throughout the remaining fir, hemlock and deciduous forest. It was tough walking; crawling over and under the log piles, at times not touching your feet to solid ground for a few hundred meters.

We probably won't write too many entries during the time we are land based, but when we return to Curare in May 2019 we will start writing more often again. And we hope to plan an itinerary that will allow us to spend more than 90 days on the water.

End of Another Great Sailing Season

What a wonderful three months of sailing we've had. Too bad it couldn't have been longer as there is so much to see, but now all we have are our memories as we've spent the past week getting Curare ready for her long winter nap.

We chose a yard south of Stockholm (Swede Port Marina) to haul Curare out of the water, located in a village called Nävekvarn. The village has an industrial history dating back to the 1300's and in 1623 an iron foundry was established making cannons and cannonballs for the Swedish military. After cannons became passe the foundry produced stoves, fountains, urns, garden tables and benches. When production finally ended the large warehouses were re-purposed for indoor boat storage. These warehouses are 700 metres from the shore and probably 50 metres above sea level so Curare got to go on her first road trip up a moderate grade and over a bridge with a 12 tonne load limit. To transport the boats a trailer with hydraulic hoists is used to lift the boat out of the water and a large Volvo loader tows the trailer and boat to the storage yard. Boats are worked on in stages so that on Tuesday and Thursday boats get hauled and on the other three working days masts are lifted off and boats stored inside of the sheds. This schedule allowed us to complete our cleanup and stowage rituals as well as give the hull a good cleaning and coat of wax.

We've dried out the sails, washed the halyards and lines and thoroughly cleaned out every nook and cranny, i.e. our annual storage preparations. Once again Curare will be staying inside of a  building for the winter but as we are in Sweden, where the sea generally freezes over each year, we are expecting colder temperatures than last winter. Water lines have been cleared out, the bilges pumped dry and antifreeze added wherever the lines could not be drained. All of the left over bottles, jars and containers of cooking supplies have been stored inside of bins so that any eruption should be well contained.

Barring any damage from something freezing we should be ready to get underway next spring with minimal preparations. Sleep well good ship Curare.

Baltic wildlife

The (Swedish) Archipelago Foundation (Skaergaardsstiftelsen) owns and administers about 12% of the land in the Stockholm (Swedish) archipelago, divided into 40 separate locations. Many of these are accessed by a ferry service and Swedish tourists flock to the island destinations. Some places have services like rental cabins, restaurants and even stores but most of the areas have been preserved in a somewhat wild state. Usually there is a network of trails, some with dabs of paint to show the way, others just a worn path where hundreds of people have trekked before. Whenever we were anchored nearby we took advantage of the these trails to stretch our legs and look for critters.

We thought we would see wildlife, especially because the Foundation's tourist literature shows photos of the various and many animals that inhabit the islands. I guess we do not look in the right direction at the right time because so far we have only spotted: two brown coloured deer, one fallow deer, evidence of a beaver (a tree had been gnawed) and moose droppings (this animal is called an elk in the tourist literature)

Spotting animals at sea has been equally as dismal: six seals (four on one day and two on another day) and one sea otter (running around on a beach).

On the other hand we did not have any trouble finding the insects, they are everywhere. In our estimation these three are the most bothersome:

Mosquitoes - Of course. However they only seem to buzz around in the evening, never in the morning, and we have screens for all the hatches and mosquito coils from Brazil so they did not cause us much grief.

Ants - We really did not expect to see huge ant hills in the Baltic but there they were, on the edges of the trails. The ants used the walking trails as their highways and they did not like to share. If we didn't walk fast they crawled onto our toes and inflicted a painful bite.

Wood ticks - To LE's horror she appears to be a tick magnet. After a trail walk GG comes back to the boat unscathed but LE generally has more than one tick scampering up her leg or burrowed into her skin. These guys are tiny, so tiny you have to use a 10X power hand lens to see their legs, otherwise they look like a spot that moves. Today we spoke with a Swedish couple who told us that the ticks carry both Lyme disease and Encephalitis - Great!!! All LE can do is remove the tiny pests, we are not going to give up our walks.

Mooring in the Baltic

When we arrived in Denmark, in September 2017, we had a crash course in mooring between pilings. The idea is this - you select a vacant spot between pilings, point your bow towards the dock, snag the pilings as your motor past, and leap off of your bow to tie your lines before causing any damage. This sounds fairly straightforward and easy to do but it takes a lot of practice and we never got comfortable with the maneuver, especially since the wind always seemed to blow our bow off.

This season there weren't any pilings - that type of moorage only seems to be used in Denmark and in the shallow, sandy areas of the Baltic like Germany and Poland. In the northern, deeper Baltic most mooring is done using a stern buoy. The buoys all have a long galvanized pole with a loop at the top which passes right through the floaty bit and attaches directly to the anchor chain, and this is (hopefully) attached to a large heavy block on the sea floor. You see these buoys everywhere there is a dock because no one, and we stress NO ONE, ever ties up alongside - even if there is a lot of space. The idea is the same as the pilings - you select a spot at the dock, snag the buoy with a stern line as you motor past and then the person at the helm slowly pays out the line so the bow miraculously stops just short of the dock. At this point the person on the foredeck calmly steps off and secures the bow lines. To snag the loop we purchased a long stainless steel hook that is especially made for this type of mooring; prior to owning this hook we had to feed our line through the loop as we motored past, a difficult thing to do.

A variation on the stern buoy is the stern anchor. This type of mooring is used in the anchorages of the Finnish and Swedish archipelagos where the locals enjoy tying their bow to the rocks and it is also used at some of the docks. All boats in the Baltic, except for Curare, have stern anchors attached to a reel of non-stretchy webbing, and all boats have cut away pulpits which makes it easy to step off the bow.  In addition many of the boats have a bow ladder so the line handler does not have to leap a great distance. Since using a stern anchor is the same at a dock or on a rock I'll just describe the rock. You select your rock, drop your stern anchor and slowly pay out the line stopping less than half a meter from shore; then tie your bow lines to suitable trees. Once secure you unload your lawn chairs, your BBQs, your coolers and your sun umbrellas - all of a sudden your "boat" has become enormous. In theory this type of mooring works very well because you can get a whole mess of boats into a small anchorage all snuggled up to each other, just like in a marina, but if the wind shifts overnight you could end up with your bow bumping against the rock - not a pleasant feeling.

A few marinas use a variation of the stern tie theme - once you have come into the dock with your bow lines ready, you pick up a line on the dock and walk it to the stern. This line is tied to a mooring block so you pull yourself off of the dock by tightening this stern line. Even though everyone uses lots of fenders, on our rare visit to a marina we always managed to have the boat next door crash into us and leave a scar.

Since Curare does not have an easily deployed stern anchor  and we do not have a cut away pulpit we opted to anchor, except when we used a guest harbour/marina. The one time we tried the rock method  we were not very successful and moved out to anchor after a few hours of looking at the rock getting closer and closer. Almost all of the anchorages had someplace to drop our hook so that is what we did; the locals thought we were very odd. But we were away from the bugs on shore, the loud children, the partying people and if the wind switched directions we just rotated in place. Anchoring is still our preferred method.

Stockholm Archipelago

The Stockholm Archipelago is a group of islands lying between 59 degrees 55 minutes N and 58 degrees 45 minutes N, or 60 nautical miles in a north-south direction and east of the Swedish capital. Some of these islands are large enough to have their own schools and medical centers, others are only a few meters in size and others are hidden, lying just beneath the surface at high water. Navigating between these islands and hidden dangers is not difficult if the person at the helm is paying attention and if you have a set of good charts. And here we have a confession to make. We did not buy the Swedish charts, mainly because we would have needed three chart kits to cover the 60 mile distance we wanted to travel and each chart kit cost a large amount of money. This is the first time in 11 years that we have sailed without paper charts and it made us a bit nervous.

We use C-Map electronic charts for our Furuno Chart plotter and we have the same charts on our tablet, so prior to leaving Canada LE went on-line and visited the Swedish Hydrographic website (www.hydrographica.se) to view their published charts. The website allows the user to see the details of every chart but does not allow downloads (LE - this may be incorrect but I could not figure it out) so it is a great resource if you are connected. What LE did was select several areas of tricky navigation on the hydrographic charts and then compared these areas to our C-Map electronic charts. In every case they were the same, we were reasonably confident that our electronic charts would suffice.

What we couldn't do was view a large scale chart to choose an anchorage of our own so instead we bought a guide book titled Hamnguiden 8 Arholma - Landsort ISBN:978-82-92284-99-5 (LE bought ours on-line from HanseNautic in Germany (www.HanseNautic.de)). This guide book is excellent, it's only drawback is that the text is only in Swedish. A few years ago this guidebook was published in Swedish and English (in the same book) but when the entire book was updated in 2016 the English translations disappeared. Included with the book is a large scale planning chart showing the most used routes between the islands, the position of the lighthouses and little boxes corresponding to the numbered anchorages in the book. Despite our not being able to understand most of what was written the aerial photos and chartlets of the anchorages were better than most other guidebooks we have owned and we really could not have travelled through the Stockholm archipelago without it. Note: We are not associated with the guidebook and do not receive any sort of remuneration by saying you should buy this particular book - but if you are planning on visiting this part of the Baltic you really should.

Steamers of Vaxholm

Instead of taking Curare up the 15 mile long fairway to Stockholm we chose to go to a guest marina at the convenient location of Vaxholm. We had just sailed past the well fortified Vaxholm Fortress to enter the harbour when we heard a shrill blast of a steam whistle. It was the 1908 steam ship Storskar pulling away from the dock enroute to the outer islands of the archipelago. She is one of several 100 plus year old steam ships that still operate daily between Stockholm, Vaxholm and several destinations beyond. We decided right then that there was no better way to visit Stockholm.

The afternoon of our arrival we did the usual stuff we always do when arriving in port - clean the boat, provision with food, and for the first time since Tallinn, laundry in a machine. After a walk around the compact historic center we investigated the ferry schedule. Ferries to Stockholm leave frequently throughout the day except on Sunday, the day we wanted to travel; on Sunday there are only three steamship trips. To maximize our time in the city we decided to take an early morning bus into Stockholm and catch a steam ship for our return.

As we approached Stockholm on the bus it started to rain, the first time in weeks. When we got dropped off at the Technical Highschool it was pouring, but there was nothing we could do and we did want to see some of the city, so we put on our rain jackets and set off on a self guided walking tour. By the time we reached the embassy district the rain had slowed to a trickle and by lunch it had stopped completely, allowing us to enjoy the many old buildings, bridges and palaces.

We cut our city tour short to hop on the 1500 departure of the steamship Vastan, a classic steamer built in 1900 with a gleaming varnished interior. The journey to Vaxholm took an hour during which time we relaxed and enjoyed the scenery on shore and the abundant boat traffic with someone else at the helm for a change. It was a short, but great, trip and thoughts of the golden era of steamer travel, when famlies headed off to their summer cottages, figured prominently in our imaginations.

The ship we were on is operated by Waxholmsbolaget founded in 1869 and which has operated in the Stockholm Archipelago every single day since then! All of their ships are registered in the port of Vaxholm and have a black stripe on the funnel with a large letter "V". On August 26, 2018 several ferry operators are celebrating a 200th anniversary with twelve ships touring the waterways around Stockholm. Five of the steam vessels were built in the mid to late 1800's, the Sankt Erik was built in 1915 and is an active ice breaker and the most modern steam boat in the parade is the Hjerter Kung built in 2010. We'll be sorry to miss that great event but whenever we hear a steam whistle blowing we'll be reminded of this trip.

Another Curare Milestone

A few weeks ago, while cruising through the beautiful Aaland Islands in the Baltic Sea, Curare reached another milestone: the most northern point we have ever sailed her - 60 deg 26.82 minutes North latitude. This was epic as the most southern point we had sailed was going around Cape Horn five years ago at 56 degrees South latitude. However, the northern climate was far more hospitable and we celebrated the event by going for a swim.

Aside from the climate the topography was markedly different in the north with rounded, well glaciated rocks and islands sparsely covered in vegetation. It was somewhat reminiscent of the crew's time spent exploring in the Canadian Arctic. We enjoyed mapping the ice direction as indicated not only by the glacial striations but the shape of the islands with the classic "up Ice" hog back shape and the scalloped down ice carvings. It seems all of the area we have sailed in across Finland, Aaland and now Sweden are part of an enormous intrusive batholith that has been polished smooth by the glaciers that receded only a few thousand years ago. The land is actually still rebounding by up to 5 mm per year, unlike areas near the equator that are sinking.

While sailing past the island of Eckero we viewed several pink syenite outcrops exhibiting an impressive Rapakivi texture (large, round feldspar phenocrysts in a finer grained matrix), the same rock that was used for the columns of St. Isaacs cathedral in St. Petersburg.

It's all downhill from here.

Internet Blues

We've written about this before but it's been a few years so here is why we have not been posting very often. We have not been able to access the internet! For most people that probably sounds impossible, and for others it probably sounds like a story - but it is real.

How do we know what our friends are doing without Facebook, and what is going on in the world without News, and how do we research places to go and things to see, and what about email, or paying bills on line, and then there is the weather - how do we download the forecast? All of these things are simple when we are connected but since we left Russia that has not been easy.

Our internet connections this season were supposed to be simple, we would buy a SIM card and use it's data package tethering the phone to a computer. While in Berlin (late May) we bought a 3 month talk/text/data package with Vodaphone (3 GB data, 200 minutes, 200 texts per month for 25 Euro) and this plan was good throughout Europe, but not in Russia. Vodaphone worked just as expected all of June and at the beginning of July; we browsed the web, posted blogs, read the News, and got weather updates. When we arrived in Russia the first thing we did was buy a Russian SIM card (10 GB for $10CAD!!) - once again everything worked as expected. So we were surprised when we arrived in Finland and the Vodaphone SIM only worked for the next three days, not even to the end of July.

We received several text messages from Vodaphone but they were in German and since LE's German is exceedingly rusty she understood very little except that something had to be done on the web to make it work again (but how to do that when we had no access to the internet). Most of this time we were cruising through the islands of the Finnish archipelago and it would really have been nice to have internet as the cell signal was strong but there was nothing we could do. We did however have a working SSB radio so we got our weather reports (GRIB files) with that, without the weather reports we would have been nervous and would probably have made a more concerted effort to sort this Vodaphone thing out.

Finally, a few days ago, we saw a German flagged boat tied to a rock just a short distance from us. GG rowed over and the man on board spent about 90 minutes trying to sort it out, even using his data to access the web, but in the end it was a failure. So we are still without internet on board although we have managed to connect to free wi-fi signal here and there along the way. Meanwhile we've occupied our time by enjoying our beautiful surroundings.

In a few days we think we will be in Stockholm, or a city close by, and we should be able to get internet or the SIM card working again, but in the meantime we'll post this via the radio. Gotta love old school technology - it may be slow but it's almost always there for us.

Cruising the Aaland Islands

We've had some great weather for our travels through the Aaland Island Archipelago. It's been unusually dry and very warm with daytime temperatures mostly around 30 deg C. In addition, the Baltic Sea which is relatively shallow, is now warm enough for comfortable swimming to cool off after our day's sail. As most of the summer has been spent around 60 deg North latitude we had packed extra thermal underwear for this season so these hot days are a very pleasant surprise.

The Aaland Islands are a large group of small islands and rocks that lie in the Baltic Sea to the west of mainland Finland within the Gulf of Bothnia. The islands have been a self governed province of Finland since 1922 and today the population is close to 30,000 people, most of which live in the main city of Mariehamn. They have their own license plates without the EU symbol, their own postal service with highly sought after special stamps and a proud respect for the natural environment. It was surprising to us that Aaland has been the base for some of the largest commercial shipping fleets in the world. Gustof Ericson amalgamated the largest fleet of windjammers (66) at the beginning of the 19th century and conducted lucrative trade between Europe and Australia via Cape Horn. One of these ships, the three masted brig Pommern, is on display at the Aaland Maritime museum. The Cape Horners Club is also commemorated at the museum and we were keen to see the display. As Captain of Curare going around Cape Horn, GG is designated an Albatross while LE, as crew, gets to be known as a Mollymawk. Not sure what title the Admiral receives.

For such a small population the Aaland Islands have incredible infrastructure with roads, bridges and ferries going to all of the main islands and most of the smaller ones. There is electrical and cell coverage everywhere - we have to be careful when anchoring to ensure we don't snare a cable. Besides the shipping trade the economy of Aaland is based on high tech industries, insurance and tourism. Judging by the number of ex-pats wandering the streets of Mariehamn and eating ice cream while we were trying to reprovision, tourism is big business.

There are guest harbours throughout the islands and most of the boats use these, but we have been successful in going off the main tracks and discovering our own quiet anchorages. Cruising around the Aaland Archipelago has been a very enjoyable experience and we're certainly glad we made the effort to find this jewel of a place.

The Finnish Chart Folios

Previously we have written about the complicated navigating that happens every day we sail through Finland (and most likely in Sweden too but we haven't yet arrived). Despite the over abundance of navigation aids in every direction, with the assistance of our excellent Finnish chart portfolios what looks complicated and overwhelming becomes an easy passage.

Sailing in the south of Finland through the Aaland Islands, the Turku archipelago and the Finnish archipelago requires four chart portfolios. From west to east these are C, D, B and A. Each of these is spiral bound, is 34 cm X 46 cm (13.5 inch X 18 inch) in size, and contains about 35 charts at a scale of 1:50,000 plus blow ups charts of certain harbours or particularly tricky passages. Text is in Finnish, Swedish and English. A handy index map is included at the front of each chart portfolio so the user is not flipping furiously wondering which page they should be looking at. These charts are published by the Finnish Transportation Agency and can be purchased from John Nuriman Marine in Helsinki (also online shopping); in spring 2018 each chart portfolio cost 45.50 Euro (not including shipping).

In addition to detailing the numerous bouys, leading beacons, radar reflectors, cairns, bridges, rocks, lighthouses, uncharted areas, overhead cables and guest harbours the charts also show the main shipping channels (coloured light grey), the major small craft track (coloured green), the less important small craft tracks (coloured black), and most importantly the least depth you will encounter along the track you are following. We generally motored and sailed following the green track in company with the majority of other boats, but from time to time we strayed away from the tracks and went across areas of the chart which had very few marked rocks so we figured we were being prudent, but as we only saw one or two other boats doing the same thing perhaps it was foolish. A couple of times we had no choice and had to cross a main shipping channel and that meant avoiding the mini cruise ships or the freighters and there were more of these than we anticipated.

Most of the other pleasure boats (sailing and motor) travel from guest harbour to guest harbour which are spaced from 15 to 35 miles apart. These are great facilities with showers and, most importantly, saunas, some places have garbage collection or a store or fuel, there is a dock to tie up to and you are right next to you neighbour. Since everyone goes to the dock bow-to all of the cockpits are adjacent to each other and you could hand toilet paper back and forth if you were so inclined. It is a huge dock party. This is not really how we wanted to experience our time in the Baltic Sea so GG and I chose potential anchorages using the chart portfolios and then crossed our fingers that there would be enough mud on the bottom for the hook to grab. So far we have been successful.