Having made the islands, we have a few days to explore before our guests depart and the obvious thing to do was to circumnavigate the main group. Consequently our plan was to head northwards initially then rounding the top, travel eastwards until we reached a suitable anchorage and from the charts I picked upon one called Djupviken on the island (not quite) of Geta, some 27 miles away. We weren't able to leave straight away as I wanted to do some more blog updating and I had some mail to attend to, in fact it was 12:00 before we left. That gave Julie and our guests time to visit the local small museum and do a bit of shopping and for us all to have a coffee in the convivial café.

It was one of those days, sailing-wise . The wind was from the NW. so it meant a beat ie sailing with the wind from the front quadrant of the boat. This means that whilst you can sail reasonably quickly, you’re not doing that well in the direction you actually want to go in, you’re tacking up the wind whilst sailing considerable distances each side of the line you would like to take. Now some boats can sail relatively closely to that line and others have to take wider angles and I’m afraid that we’re one of those and seeing other boats make better upwind courses than ours is one of the biggest stress factors that I have to contend with! So to obviate that, I use the engine and after a few hours of sailing, in a thoroughly grumpy state, I switched the engine on. Hah! That showed them!

Later on, a combination of a wind change and a change in our direction meant that we could sail again and we did so into the deep bay that we were to anchor in. There were two rock-huggers and one other boat on an anchor who came in after us (actually, another one came later) but it was a large area and we felt that wonderful feeling of freedom that anchoring gives you.

We didn’t have haute cuisine that night, rather we wanted to use emergency stocks, so we had Fray Bentos pies (chicken and Steak & Kidney) with vegetables, followed by cheese and lashings of red wine. Another good day.