Our position is 59:14.266N 18:23.985E

Distance covered 27.2 Nm

We were up early with a packed programme of things to do before we could leave. We were anxious to arrive reasonably early at our next destination as it was a Friday and the anchorage is a popular target for people leaving work in Stockholm and heading out for the weekend. However we needed to shower, fill up with water, send emails, and stock up with supplies.

The showering, water, and emails didn’t take too long and the supermarket wasn’t a long walk. The usual difficulties of finding ones way round a strange shop layout and being unable to identify all the products we wanted were overcome but then we hit the checkout. There was a short queue and it seemed that most of the other shoppers seemed to be elderly gentlemen. We debated whether to use the self-service till but I couldn’t stand the thought of wrestling with “unidentified item in the bagging area” in Swedish, so we waited our turn. The girl at the till efficiently scanned our shopping as we packed it into bags and then I went back to the till to pay. The man behind me in the queue had his card in the machine, which I thought was odd but assumed it was some unusual Swedish method of controlling how much you could spend before your goods were scanned. It was not until he had finished and I was trying to pay, that it became apparent to everyone that he had paid for our shopping.  Chaos ensued as the store didn’t seem to have any mechanism for cancelling his payment. People went backwards and forwards and eventually they refunded him the amount of his payment in cash and insisted on rescanning all our shopping, so we were not away as early as we had hoped.

Once we managed to leave the day was relatively uneventful. It had been windy in the night but once we were away from the channel to Nynashamn it dropped to a manageable F3-4 and we broad reached comfortably with just the genoa. It was a pleasant, sunny day and our course took us amongst many islands and rocks. As usual the wind strengthened as we were nearing the anchorage, and our track took us head to wind but once within the bay on Agno it was wonderfully sheltered and there was still room for us to anchor.

Views along the way - not sure how the anchor got on top of the tower when there are no tides here

There are a lot of ferries in the archipelago

The town of Dalaro

All the houses have little versions at the water’s edge

The small boat had come from the larger coastguard vessel and sent a diver down. These yellow buoys with the green rope to tie to are everywhere and we assume they are connected with some sort of monitoring activity

Approach to the anchorage on Agno

We arrived with time to inflate the new dinghy and give it an outing round the bay, stopping to climb onto some cliffs for photos, and also to chat to Colin and Nicole, fellow Brits, sailing with their daughter, Kate and Dan on a new boat they are keeping locally. We were full of admiration for them for being brave enough to tie to the rocks, but Kate was bearing the scars from falling over doing it the previous day.

Launching the new (lightweight) dinghy (no champagne though)

Views around the anchorage

This was a good brood

You don’t often see sea cats

We thought this tern might be thinking of building a nest, the time he spent up here, to the detriment of the cockpit upholstery and the spray hood

Back at Moorglade, who should row up but Klaus and his 2 little girls, who were tied to the shore on the other side of the bay. He was giving the girls some exercise before bedtime but promised to bring some charts over the next morning and tell us about good places to go in the east of the archipelago.