20 - 21 May: Setting off into the Archipelago

At last we're ready to go - we finally left Sune Carlsson boatyard behind ...

... and set off into open water towards the 30,000 islands of the Stockholm archipelago ...

We had decided to spend a few days in the archipelago close to Stockholm while we made sure that everything worked properly.  Just as well!  We had only gone about half a mile before the engine overheated and the alarm sounded!  The water was very deep so we had to sail into a shallower spot to anchor and investigate the problem - so we rolled out a scrap of sail ...

... and anchored in a pretty little bay.  We had half-expected this to happen as the coolant system was likely to have air locks in it due to work on the hot water tank, so it was just a matter of topping up the coolant - here's Charles down in the engine room.

Then we could set off again.  We wanted to explore a few little bays we had not yet discovered to which we could take our friends, Caroline and David, when they arrived at the weekend.  We wound our way through delightful islands, dotted with typical Swedish wooden houses, in perfect weather with blue skies and sunshine ...

... and through a narrow entrance into Napoleonviken (Napoleon's bay) on the island of Ägnö. The name originated when Napoleon's great-nephew (also called Napoleon) passed Ägnö one hot summer's day in 1869 and took a swim in the bay ...

We moored 'bows to' a steep-sided rock in the Swedish way, running an anchor from the stern and tying the mooring lines to trees.  We could then just step ashore down a ladder over the bow ...

But we decided against taking a swim as the water temperature was only about 12°C.  Instead we scrambled up rocks through untrodden undergrowth to the top of the island for a lovely view over the trees ...

... and later celebrated our first landfall this year with the traditional glass of bubbly ...

The next morning the wind direction had changed and our anchor started to drag, so we moved to a better spot in the bay, which was also lower-lying land, and took a walk around the island.  This looked, at first, a beautiful view, but the mound in the foreground turned out to be a huge anthill!  And there were plenty of enormous ants crawling about - you had to avoid them, or brush them off quickly, because they bit!

We walked around the bay and looked back at our boat tied up to a rock - it looks as though we've made rather a bad navigational error!!

Parts of the island have lush green grass and tall luxuriant trees, still coming into leaf as Spring is rather later in Sweden ...

In other places, wild flowers seem to grow literally out of the rock ...

This is a view across one of the bays at the far side of the island ...

... and there were some lovely reflections once the wind had died.