The weather suited the occasion, it was drizzly and miserable, Still, we had things to do, including 5 loads of washing, so there was no idling about, everyone was up and the 3 machines we'd booked were busy by 08:00.

Our plan for the last morning was to get the washing done, then take the luggage over to the west harbour where the ferries come in and leave the bags there, then go to a museum followed by an early lunch and see our guests onto the 14:25 ferry back to Stockholm . Things started to go awry within two minutes of leaving for the west harbour, when Julie and I had to scurry back to the festooned boat to put the washing down below, as the heavens had opened. Returning to where E&R were waiting under a tree, the rain thankfully eased off and we didn’t get too damp walking over, down the nicely wooded and ordered streets with some tasteful old houses. It looks like a very pleasant, peaceful town to live in.

Having left the bags in a locker in the Viking terminal, we needed coffee and we found ourselves in a café in the west marina, immediately behind the imposing stern of the Pommern, which constitutes a part of the maritime museum here. The Pommern was built in the UK in 1903 and is a 4-masted steel barque and which set the record in the 1930’s Great Grain Race, sailing from Australia to England via Cape Horn in 86 days. Quite a nice backdrop for a cup of coffee, in the now pouring rain, so much so that we decided to stay put for lunch, as the café was in reality a pizzeria . And glad that we did, we had truly excellent thin-crust pizzas, called pizza herring, but which had hot smoked salmon and prawns on, no herrings – they were absolutely delicious.



Lunch over, there was not much left to do other than walk back to the terminal, say our sad farewells and then head on back to the shops, to do a bit more provisioning. The weather, despite the forecast promising an improving situation, got very much worse, with hard rain and mist, later dense fog. A truly awful day.

The day was even worse for one poor powerboat owner. He was just negotiating his way into a berth when unbeknownst to him, his two year old child down below pushed the throttles fully open, so the boat literally leapt forward and up onto the pontoon, stopping just short of a very large, very expensive (well over a £million) power boat on the opposite side, before lurching back and sinking tail first, leaving just the bows out of the water. Very happily, there were no injuries at all so whilst it was a tragedy, it could have been infinitely worse and within a few hours, the boat was lifted and taken away.