Fjord Sailing Germany into Denmark

Suzie Too - Western Caribbean
David & Suzanne Chappell
Sun 11 May 2008 07:43

We keep asking ourselves why do we sail in the UK, tides, choppy seas, windy weather...?. The Baltic seems great at the moment, no tides, sailing in flat calm seas, less than ½ metre waves, no currents... easy sailing and its very sunny at the moment.. Heaven!!!! We just miss our sailing friends!.

We are now in the Kiel Fjord, visiting anchorages, German towns and villages and mastering the mooring in between 2 piles and the pontoon, there is a certain technique which we have no got yet. We visited Massholm a delightful fishing town, caught no fish and thankfully no eels ( as this is what they are famous for) , anchored in Jelly fish bay, we have never seen so many, hundreds of white ones and a few red ones all around the boat so it stopped us swimming we then arrived in Flendsburg, moored up, very pretty town, we ended up having 2 nights there (looked like Gosport looking at Portsmouth at night remaindered us of home), we went typical shopping, shorts for me and boat things for David, he picked up a anchor ladder and spent £200+ in the chandlery. The pontoons as so low, the jump from the bow was more than my height.....nearly broke my ankle jumping down another injury waiting to happen, now I get down a ladder to secure the bow, still need to master this.

We had 33 deg in the cockpit today and used our Bimini for the first time..

Sunday the 11th May, been away 4 weeks and 4 days we left Flendsburg and had a wonderful sail down the Fjord to Sonderbourg 25 miles, wind between 10 and 15 knots lots of tacking though so quite hard work upto the town quay against a lovely white fender Kaikoura.

We were in Denmark our target destination is Copenhagen in 2 weeks time as we fly home..

I had some good news today and bad news, the good news was that my father was being sent home from hospital, finally after 7 weeks of being on the critical list, I have lived with this everyday and was always planning my exit back home, now I feel great as he has improved enough to go home, thank god what a relief. The bad news was that the house we were going to buy in Gosport has fell through the people have backed out and now not selling...back to apartment living.

When we landed in Sonderbourg I walked to the bank as we had no Danish money, David went to bed with slight sunstroke he felt rather light headed (we had not worn a hat all day or glasses silly boy) we had an easy night made a meal on board did some route planning and an early night. Next morning we go up early to explore the town only to find out that Denmark has another bank holiday today and all the shops were closed. So we felt a change of plan coming on, the bridge was lifting at 11.18 and with 10 minutes to go, both of us got ready and passed through the bridge and we decided to go to our next destination an idyllic anchorage 11.5 miles down the fjord a day early.

Pictures of Sonderborg on a busy Monday morning ( another Bank holiday )

Are we going to get under the bridge?

The rush hour to get through the bridge....

Our first floating ice cream shop

Just at anchor in Massholm

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