Category: Denmark

We wrote in the cruising association guide that the Margretheholms havn marina in Copenhagen:

‘was not going to suit most British cruisers. You enter the shallow marina through an industrial dockland area where rock is being unloaded for the ongoing land reclamation works at the entrance. The marina is surrounded by abandoned ship yards from a bygone era that resonate to the sound of rave parties till the early hours on weekends. The supermarket is a 45 minute walk and the sites of Copenhagen a further 30 minutes beyond. However before dismissing Margretheholms havn, its worth noting one of the best bakeries in Denmark is only a few hundred meters from the marina, which is close to the street food markets open 7 days, and a selection of fine dining restaurants including the worlds best restaurant are within walking distance. The opera house and Christiania are a 30 minute walk which may be excessive as there are art galleries, rock climbing gyms, bars and the indescribable Empirical flavour adventure just around the corner.’

SV away

It would be easy to judge Copenhagen by its cover:

Copenhagen is where we have spent this most time this season. In total we stayed here for 6 weeks, three as we passed through from Germany towards Sweden, and 3 when we sailed back from the east coast of Sweden heading to our planned winter home of Scotland. Needless to say, we hope to come back. Good food, good drink, good friends and overall a wonderful place to spend time.

However, as all cruisers know, we have to say goodbye to these amazing places and people and move along for new adventures. Our plan is to sail the west coast of Sweden and across the south coast of Norway relatively quickly, as the window for sailing across the north sea will be closing soon. Hopefully we get one! Or perhaps we will just stay in Denmark somehow. They have an Australian Princess – surely that counts!!!?

We broke the inertia and reversed out of our box berth at the dock in Copenhagen.

It would be a good days sail into our first stop in Sweden, Ystad. It was a fairly uneventful sail, good winds, and we made decent time. We have no idea what the wind strength is at the moment as our wind instruments have failed, but on our last boat, “Addictive” we never had any wind instruments and we simply learned to read the ocean, the sky, and watch other boats. We are quickly getting back into that rhythm now that we have no wind instruments.

We weren’t sure what to expect arriving in Ystad – which is usual as all these places are a first for us. It is currently Swedish summer holidays, so we were expecting it to be pretty busy, and we were not disappointed. Coming in we overtook another couple of boats who followed us in, down the narrow arm of the visitors dock area. This meant that we couldn’t manoeuvre really at all, and had no choice but to look hopefully at a boat already comfortably alongside the dock enjoying their sundowners, and ask “can we raft up with you?”. They were very obliging and helped us tie up to their boat safely, as the other boats behind us rafted up to the other vessels on the dock too. We learned pretty quickly that this was going to be a quick overnighter for us, and we planned to leave the next day after we had a bit of a walk around town.

The next day arrived, and we were awoken from our slumber and comfy bed by a rap on the hull – our neighbours, the boat we rafted up to wanted to leave. Very early. As Away did not fit where they were on the dock (we rafted up to them, but we were also almost rafted up with the boat in front too), it meant that we had to leave too. Up we jumped, threw some clothes on, and we were untying the lines and bow thrusting out, before coffee.

We are heading toward Bornholm, an island south of Sweden belonging to Denmark. Bornholm is a pretty interesting place, it is one of the places that Russia would very much like to have in its land ownership books, and in fact Russia “practiced” a takeover of the island, whilst there were delegates present for a function there. So its quite a politicised island, but when we got there, all we found was an empty and calm anchorage, white sandy beaches, and some swimming.

We spent 3 glorious days here, enjoying the water and the walks on the island. Its extremely cute. Bernie enjoyed chasing his bumpers on the beach, and Adrian and I got in for a swim a few times. The water is very cold, but at the beach it was a couple of degrees warmer. The sand is fine and very white, and we basked in the sunshine. This is what its about!

One morning Adrian and I were struggling to sleep. The boat was side on to the swell, and even with such a heavy boat, we were getting chucked around. It was about 5, and Adrian looked at me and said “should we just get out of here” – Yup! I was over the rolling!

NOW, we are heading toward Sweden again and going to stay there for a while and explore the archipelagos.

Arriving in Copenhagen, and as we navigated our way into the marina, we wondered what we had done by choosing this marina… All around there was construction, industry and things were looking a little bleak. Little did we know, this is simply a façade, and we found ourselves in the vibrant and ever changing east side of Copenhagen, with its street food markets, farmers markets, saunas, 5 star restaurants and constant streams of happy people eating, drinking, swimming and sunbaking.

Our first day in the city was really all about getting our bearings. We grabbed the dog lead (and Bernie) and headed off towards the city proper, making our way through the university and then straight into Christiania, a little unintentionally…

If you don’t know about Christiania, it is an area in Copenhagen that is officially sectioned off for those who wish to live an alternative lifestyle. It was founded in 1971 by some free thinkers who basically squatted in the area. They declared it “Free” – free from the Danish law. It started with a small group, and there have been various conflicts over its time there, but they are considered independent of the Danish rules and laws. The conflicts are typically due to the large number of drug sellers that line the main street. No one is allowed to take photos here so please enjoy some images from our walk outside Christiania.

We wandered through briefly down the main street aptly called “Pusher Street”, feeling the eyes on us (there are cartels here) and decided we’d have a quick look, then exit and save a longer look for another time. I popped into a lovely shop and found my mandatory Christiania magnet!

After this much excitement we were up for beers and lunch at a local street food market and an afternoon nap!

The following days were spent exploring and doing some boat jobs. We also met our wonderful marina neighbour who offered to take us for a ride around town in his car. He is a local of 25 years and knows the area well. We locked in his unofficial tour for a few days later.

We found a wonderful restaurant called Øens Have which boast the largest urban farm in Copenhagen so we enjoyed the Chef’s choice lunch there which was delicious.

Naturally, we saw Copenhagen’s famed little mermaid, albeit from across the water. We considered getting a little closer, but the crowds of peering tourists, people jumping the fence and even people hovering in their boats encouraged us to appreciate her from afar. And we did so, a number of times from another gem street food market called Reffen during the long midsommar evenings.

A couple of days later, our unofficial tour was here! Our neighbour, Morten, drove us down the coast, passing quaint town after quaint marina after quaint town!

We headed inland and visited Roskilde, where they have the Vikings museum and a rather large cathedral that houses the remains of a number of Danish royals.

We also visited Rungstead Harbour, a place of opulent delights, and had some icecream before heading back to the marina and our floating homes.

No rest for the wicked I say, I was dead keen to visit Tivoli and so we did the very next day. It was fabulous and I love rollercoasters and these didn’t disappoint. Adrian as ever was my diligent photographer, scary ride researcher and queue checker for the next ride. Its a beautiful theme park with something for everybody.

Prior to arriving in Copenhagen, I had been at a bit of a loss as to how to celebrate Adrian’s birthday. Not knowing where we would be, and not really being near shops or having a delivery address makes things a little tricky. When I knew we would be in Copenhagen, I got to planning.

Adrian’s birthday started the day before which was the Wednesday (this will be relevant later) with coffee in bed, and then up for a quick dog walk. Once Bernie was happily panting, we left him to sleep it off in the boat, and we jumped on our bikes into town.

Breakfast was cinnamon scrolls from Copenhagen’s oldest bakery. These are the “Wednesday” scrolls as they only make them on Wednesdays (hence starting his birthday a day early) and they sell over 4000 each Wednesday. They were as delicious as their manufactured scarcity would suggest and we rode to a nearby park and enjoyed them with coffee under a tree.

Next up was the Rosenborg Castle, originally built by King Christian IV in 1606 as a summer house, it was eventually converted to a large trinkets cabinet in the 18th century, housing all sorts of amazing artefacts and collections owned by the various Danish Royals. The Crown jewels are also located here in all their extravagance. It was a really interesting castle and we’re glad we took the time out to visit.

I had more plans for this birthday! Onwards towards the Round Tower, aptly named, as to get up to the top you need to ascend the spiral ramp going around and around and around. This was the observatory, and also housed a library. The ramp was so that the horses could take up equipment and books to the top of the tower. Beautiful views of Copenhagen!

One more stop before we went home, to Copenhagen’s oldest patisserie where Adrian chose some cake for his birthday the next day.

Dinner was at a beautiful restaurant called Amass where we had the full menu, inclusive of wines, and at the end I literally tried to tip the staff the same price as the dinner. Basically I tried to pay double the cost – I guess there were a few courses with lovely matching wines and maybe I was a little confused by the machine… Ooooops!

The next day, Adrian’s actual birthday, I had fantastic plans to do some more tourist-ing, but as it turns out, a 10 course menu with basically full glasses of matching wines doesn’t bode well for energy levels the following morning for either of us. So we stayed in bed a little longer than usual, and took it easy that day. We even ended up just eating the cake for dinner, and called it an early night.

Over the coming days, we settled into a nice routine, and felt the familiar pull of the inertia. We were getting comfortable. We had places we liked, we found shortcuts to things (mainly through Christiania) and had discovered the road less travelled in a lot of places. In Christiania, we found some of the most quaint waterside homes far away from the dealers on Pusher street, we also found near us Michelin starred restaurants, farmers markets, quaint bakeries, saunas and more.

But our Swedish residency permits had arrived in the mail like a well timed signal.

So we planned to leave finally after 2 weeks. The washing was done, the boat was packed away ready to sail, the magnet board was getting heavier, Bernie enjoyed his few extra doggy walks, and we had a date forecasted with good winds to head to Sweden.

We left our anchorage at Agerso expecting a comfortable 4 hour straight line trip to Femo. There are so many possible destinations, but in this case we chose Femo because it had a protected anchorage, was a short sail away and was an island. There is something special about pulling up at an island in your own boat.

Our 4 hour trip soon became 2.5 hours as the forecasted light winds spiced up and our speed rarely fell below 8 knots even after we reduced the sails.

Once we got into the lee of the island conditions calmed down. There were no anchored boats indicating the position of the anchorage so we had to select a spot with a sandy bottom and not too deep.

The anchorage provided better shelter from the wind than Agerso and by next day we had light winds and sunshine for a walk around the island.

I decided to dive under the boat and check the bolts holding the center board in. With a suitable number of wet suits on and my weight belt I soon discovered that the right weight for salty water is way too much for brackish Baltic water. After making some adjustments we confirmed that everything was still attached.

The next day we took advantage of favorable winds and headed east and under a bridge that didn’t exist, clenched under 2 bridges that definitely did exist, avoided a bridge that might have tickled the mast, took a short cut through shallow water, crossed a large bay and eventually stopped for the night under some chalk cliffs.

The next day we again had good winds albeit on the nose to get to Praesto. The wind gradually turned in our favour and we almost made it to the Fjord on a single tack. The Praesto Fjord started as wide channel gradually narrows until barely wide enough for a couple of boats to pass. Finally a small harbour and marina appear. There is a pontoon in the middle of the harbour that could just fit Away and conveniently it had a space for us.

When the winds returned we headed for open water and our first big city in a while. Copenhagen was a day sail away. We were getting some deliveries to a marina and intended to stay for at least a week whilst preparing for the next leg. The wind died towards the end of the trip so we prepared the light wind sails and as expect the winds increased and we soon reducing sail as Copenhagen came into view.

Next time we become Swedish residents, Bernie makes friends with his ramp and we almost join Le Tour de France on our Bromptons.

We left you last time leaving Flensburg and heading for Denmark. It didn’t take long to get there. The Flensburg Fjord is the border between Germany and Denmark with the Germans looking after the port markers and the Danish the starboard. A vessel tacking up the fjord should, in theory, swap courtesy flags on each tack. Fortunately no one really cares and a strengthening northerly minimised our need to tack or change flags.

It was the end of a long weekend and the entrance of the fjord resembled a busy round about with yachts heading back to their home ports. With a strong wind and occasional showers we had retired to the lounge and brewed a pot of tea. When other yachts passed close by we jumped up on deck, waved to the bedraggled skippers so they were not unduly worried by the unmanned yacht passing them, and then quickly returned to the warmth below deck.

Within fifteen minutes the forecasted weather change brought sunshine, then no wind and then light winds. We scrambled on deck and set to work raising the big red sail. Thirty minutes later big red was happily propelling us at 4.5 knots in less than 10 knots of wind. Good news as we were closing in on another yacht racing in the same direction.

After an extended tacking duel with the smaller yacht we tucked into the crowded anchorage at the island of Aero. Crowded because there was another yacht anchored. It seems most yachts in the Baltic are not set up to be at anchor. Many do not have dinghies and their anchors often look a little ornamental. As there are so many marinas/harbours so close together we suspect most charter boats and many local sailors move from marina to marina missing the endless anchoring opportunities throughout the area.

The town of Aeroskobing was a short walk away and lived up to its billing as one of the most picturesque towns in Denmark. The story goes that in poorer times they couldn’t afford to update their houses, which later turned out to be a great tourist attraction with, the now well maintained, older houses providing a step back in time.

After a couple of days, we decided to head to a town called Svendborg. It was only a short sail across the bay. We had been told there are no tides to worry about in the Baltic, but it did seem like we were being whisked into Svendborg at 2 knots more than our boat speed. The tide also rushes through the harbour which can make docking a little tricky. But on this occasion it allowed us to stop the boat a few meters off the dock and let the tide do the rest.

Svendborg was one of those places where we had unexpected great experiences and it easily exceeded our expectations.

Away always attracts some attention, but at Svendborg there was a constant stream of people walking along the dock to take a look. They usually want to know if we have sailed from Australia and then a bit about the boat. Some are dreaming of their own trip someday, some own a boat and want to chat boats and some come for look just because its different and has an Australian flag. Even the police popped over for a look using the excuse of checking our passports.

On Sunday morning we slipped out of Svendborg harbour and made good use of the outgoing tide until the wind filled in and headed north around Langeland. We had picked a little anchorage that a local had told us we would have to ourselves. As we took down the sails and prepared to anchor, another aluminum boat arrived and later we were joined by a third boat for the night.

After a couple of nights of bouncing in the gusty winds, we leave Agerso and enjoy our fastest sail to another island with lots of trolls and apple juice, and no wind.