Blog
Outside, the wind was blowing at force 5–6 from the west, but inside, along the skerries and through the small natural channels, we were well sheltered. Sailing is practically impossible here anyway, and out there I wouldn’t have gotten any closer to my destination. So we motored along the beautiful Blindleia Strait for the first part of the journey. A real sightseeing cruise. We passed small settlements, vacation homes, harbors, rock formations…
This island belongs to the municipality, and anyone can dock there, camp, or just spend the afternoon. There is a small café run by volunteers, who in return get to live in the house on the island for free during that time.
We set sail from Rønnerhavnen at 3 a.m. It was already almost light out—or rather, it had never really gotten dark. The 100 nautical miles that Amy can normally cover in 24 hours would certainly take longer, since the winds were expected to be light. But the wind was coming from a fairly good direction.
After we had passed the large roadstead off Skagen, the first surprise awaited us just past the headland. The strong winds of the previous days had left behind quite a swell, coming from all directions. With light winds, Amy was tossed back and forth by the cross seas, and life on board quickly became miserable. It wasn’t until late afternoon that things finally calmed down, and by evening the sea had become smooth, allowing us a relaxed sail against a light headwind but still heading toward our destination.
I am in Rønnerhavnen, have just finished eating, and am drinking a relatively expensive (but for Scandinavian countries still pretty cheap) Danish beer from a can. The sun still hasn’t set (it’s past 10 p.m.). The 2026 Swedish Midsummer Festival will have to take place without Amy and me again this year.
Here is the whole Route. In order to save data and waypoints there are some straight lines where Amy was of course never going in a really straight line. You can zoom into the Satellite Map and if you would like to see the names of places you can click here for the topographic map. You can also view the map in full screen.
I was expecting to have to motor most of the way to the Greifswalder Bodden and the hopefully catch some wind towards evening to cross towards the Dänische Wiek. But contrary to the forecast, we were able to sail the whole distance. We had left Saßnitz at noon and dropped the anchor in front of the entrance to the river at 8:30pm. All this felt very surreal. I could very vividly remember the day that I had taken off more that 13months and 14000nm ago and now we were returning the same way.
There was a lot of traffic and I didn’t get much sleep and the wind turned against us around 6am. Up until then it had been a perfect sail. We arrived in Saßnitz around 1pm after having to tack to windward for the last few miles. That way we had our own personal sightseeing tour of the white cliffs. There were so few ships in the harbour that we thought it would be closed. But it was open as always and we were happy to be able to chose were to go. We then went out for fish rolls and enjoyed the day. In the evening we had a barbecue and ate dinner with wine on the pier where they had installed some benches.
We did take off early (at 3:30am) and made it to Rødvig with a lot of tacking against ever increasing winds. We had initially wanted to sail to Klintholm but after listening to never-ending gale warnings on the vhf and our tacking angle now being at 160 degrees because of the steep waves, we decided to turn into Rødvig instead. This turned out to be a good choice.
Backing Amy into the box required a lot of lines that had to be attached here and there and slowly pulling ourselves towards the jetty. There was a gentleman (Georg as it turned out) waiting patiently for me to hand him a rope. I was trying to explain how it isn’t possible to go astern with Amy (like always) but he didn’t need explanations and could apparently appreciate our working with the lines. This made him instantly likeable.
Our AIS wasn’t working again so I stayed up most of the night because of heavy shipping traffic. We arrived at the Hamletcastle of Helsingør at dawn and were accompanied by some porpoises and then sailed through the Sound leaving Ven to starboard and now Zissi could take over the watch and I got a few hours of sleep. We passed Malmö in Sweden and went under the Øresundbridge when the wind died but it was only a few hours from there to Höllviken where the canal is.
