It was absolutely flat calm, not even a breath of wind and not a cloud in the sky. It was a lovely morning. It had been quite cool overnight as there was quite a heavy dew but the sun soon dried everything up.

We had the second half of the Swedish black pudding for breakfast and collectively decided that that was it, until we get home to a Bury version! Then, at 09:00 we had the engine on and at 11:15, we were in the pretty little harbour on Utö, 10 miles nearer Stockholm . There was virtually no wind at all during the morning and indeed, it amounted to very little throughout the day – it was a lovely day. Moreover, the barometric pressure was now 1012, a lot higher than it has been for a while, so fingers are definitely crossed that things are stabilising for the summer.

Now when I say 'at 11:15, we were in the pretty little harbour on Utö', that understates matters. What I really meant to say was that my complete fixation on insisting on finding a kedge anchor that we could deploy was entirely vindicated as there were no buoys to tie up to here, everyone was dropping the anchor and tying the bows to the pontoon – and so did we!

Small islands with a condensed tourist season have to charge to survive and hence we were not surprised to be charged 265 SEK for the pontoon and an additional 60 for one machine load of washing (+ drying to be fair but we didn’t want that and there was no discount) . Still, it is a nice spot and we were pleased to be here; also en route I forgot to mention that we saw our first osprey – I thought at first it was a seagull but then it did what ospreys do (but missed) and that got my attention and the binoculars and yes, it was one.



After doing the 60SEK washing and having had lunch, we went for a walk. What a lovely walk! The main (only) road traverses the island and we walked down it, disturbed by the occasional cyclist and tourist on a hired Lambretta or some such device. In between, it was perfect peace and now that the sun had some heat in it, the pine resins were evident, mixed in with the perfume from wild roses – it made a heady mix. We passed one grass snake (small) crossing the road and came across 2 more that sadly failed to make it. Grass snakes must be here in their hundreds! I also saw a greater spotted woodpecker, bad photo given as evidence and not a bad photo but bad example of the genre, photo also provided, a Russian oven . This and it’s fellows date from the Great Northern War (1700 – 1721 – bet you didn’t cover that in your history ‘O’ Levels/ GCE’s/GCSE’s (the latter just in case there is one reader <40!)), when Russian troops overran the island, laid waste to the iron ore mines and built lots of bread ovens as proof of their having been here.

When we got to the church we turned back and then took a side road, that climbed a small hill and gave us a lovely view, plus a sight of the old windmill. Then we returned to the boat, ice creams in hand, our reward for our little expedition. Sadly, our lovely little harbour was now not so nice, we had 4 power boats with ‘youff’ on board, drinking, displaying tattoos and in my opinion, completely unacceptably, playing execrable music very loudly. This put me in a bad mood, gin helped and then they stopped, so all is well with the world….