Baltic Adventure, Part 6: Sailing to Elisaari

6/19/2012 - 3rd day on the Wesilind. Remember how we'd agreed that it was going to be too rainy to sail and gone to bed without turning on our alarms? Well, another possibility we'd discussed was getting up early and see what's happening and deciding then, and that was what actually happened. Early in the morning there was a tap tap tap on my cabin door. My sleep-fogged "whaaaa?" was answered with a cheery "Get up, we're leaving!"

Capt. Cat & F. had both awakened pretty early to find that for all the certainty of rain we'd thought we'd seen in the forecast, it wasn't raining, and although it had turned cloudy, it didn't look like it was about to start. Maybe the forecast was wrong, maybe we'd misread the unfamiliar symbols, but whatever the case, they decided it would be wise to seize the moment & get underway. I threw on my windbreaker and windpants over my nightclothes, we all wolfed the yogurt & granola that was our usual breakfast, ran to the onshore restrooms (we were using shore facilities as much as we could to go easy on our water supply & holding tank), reboarded, cast off, and set sail.

It was an excellent call.

From my journal: 10:40 am. Latitude check says we're in the 60's!

60°01'1" N 24°11'5" E

WE ARE REALLY FAR NORTH! Between Norra Sadö and Södra Sadö, headed for a skinny passage at Stora Angesto. Rain relented so we are headed for our original destination of "Allisaria". Will check spelling later when we've switched to that chart page. This is a beautiful little passage, reminds me of Puget Sound - little islands, pine green.

 And now I'll let the camera do the talking for a bit:

run duckies run! 

Ducks and 'yaks. I would love to come back here and do a kayak trip in these islands someday...

The boat had these high seats built into the railings, one on each side of the transom, hanging out over the swim deck - they were the perfect place to sit and survey your domain, as F. demonstrates here. 

Navigation light

more ducks, a whole flotilla

Another lovely little summerhouse - I think this may have been my favorite.

Eventually it did start to rain, as promised, but fortunately never that hard, just a drizzle. Visibility was cut down a bit, and with all these little islands, at one point we did get confused about exactly where our path was. As Capt. Kat said later, though, we were never lost, we knew exactly where we were (we'd just crossed the well-marked green path again, in fact, so we were positive of that), we just weren't sure where we were supposed to go next. She simply had us circle until we'd sorted out our markers and islands and then we carried on. 

Downwind

Small troop carrier of some sort, going somewhere in a hurry.

At this point, boy, was I glad I'd brought my drysuit. I wasn't sure, I thought it might be overkill, but when I'd looked at the average temperatures, weather, and water temperatures in the Gulf of Finland in June, they were really right in that range where a drysuit may not be necessary, but can make the difference between being dry (and happy) and being damp (which puts a damper on things, ha ha) on a drizzly day. It did. Thanks Kokatat for getting my 2nd free replacement to me just as fast as you said you would!

The guys decided some coffee would be nice too, and it was.

Okia coming...

Okia passing. They were motorsailing, ready to get to where they were going. Doesn't that jib look bright in all the grays?

Wing and wing

Nearing our destination. Earlier in this series, I'd mentioned a "trust exercise" that Marika at sailing.ee had set up for us - it was in here somewhere. All of our overnight stops were based on Marika's personal recommendations, with our preferences (mostly "country, not city", 'cause we're all from cities) kept in mind. The small hitch here was that the Wesilind had a draft of 1.6 meters, and at one point, as you wended your way into the harbor, you had to pass through a little neck that the chart showed as being 1 meter deep. The chart was pretty old, and we all agreed that Marika would not have told us to take her boat anywhere that her boat couldn't actually go, but we we went through veeeeeeery slowly and watched the depth meter like hawks. Went fine of course, although I think it did come as shallow as 4 meters.

After that it was a nice clear channel...

all the way in...

emphasis on "WAY in" - we were saying that if we hadn't been told it was back here, we'd never have expected to find a big recreational boating facility way back in this marsh. In fact I think we still would've been worried that we weren't going the right way, except that out at the edge of the marsh, another sailor was passing us, saw that we had our fenders & docklines out and were driving slowly and looking around intently - he pointed in the direction that we'd been thinking had to be it, except that it looked like an improbable place to take a keelboat, and smiled and nodded enthusiastically - we were pretty sure he was saying "You've got the right place" so we headed on in...and in and in and in.  

And there it was - Elisaari!