I can’t wait to leave in the morning. I find this scenery so depressing that I long to be somewhere that there is a little life. We pack up quickly and make our way gingerly out through Kråksundsgap. The wind is quite strong again today and once out of the protection of the islands, the sea is still somewhat rough.




Apparently in the 1970s a large cargo ship was tossed up onto these rocks in a storm, so one can’t be too careful. For smaller boats, there is a tiny, winding inner passage, but it is considered much more macho to go through the gap (“Är du karl så tar du Gapet”). Lars-Göran puts on his very best Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry face and quips “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do!” so the gap it is! Luckily this display of male pride went without a hitch. I was reading about a guy in the nineteenth century who made the same remark when he was sailing home in a small skiff with his brand new bride and her dowry (a fine milking cow). The skiff overturned in the rough water of "the gap" and all three of them had to swim to land. I bet he got an earful when they came ashore!




Just past "the gap", we come again to the pretty town of Mollösund – another place on my wish list. While it is touted as a genuine fishing village, the truth is that the fish have pretty much died out in this stretch of the coast and the fishing nets strung here and there are more for decoration these days. Any fresh fish on sale more than likely arrived here via truck from Norway. It buzzes in the summer, full to the brim with visiting boats from Norway, Denmark, Germany and Holland and a glance at the guest harbour shows us that yet again we will have to give it a miss.




You really can’t even fit a rowboat into that mess. This is another disappointment as the older part of the town, far away from the pubs and cafés crowded around the harbour, with the pretty church and old fishing sheds look very inviting.




Much of the genuine old environment has been retained, with boatsheds, fishermen’s houses and piers. The old wooden houses with pretty leadlight windows crowd together along the narrow cobblestone streets and on top of the hill, the old windmill looks down on the town. There are also quite a few of the large wooden racks for drying fish. Here ling fish was treated with lye, to become the popular Christmas dish of lutfisk. Don't laugh, but I quite like lutfisk, though I cook it in a very unSwedish way, with onion, garlic, tomatoes, black olives, lemon juice and lashings of tabasco sauce and served on a mound of polenta. Yum, I am making myself hungry again.




I would also have liked to visit Mollö island, just across the water, as it is known for its cows. Every year cows are sent over by boat from the mainland to graze. These famous ecological Mollö cows are left to wander freely around the island all summer, before being ferried back to the mainland in the autumn. Sometimes apparently, the cows get bored and simply swim across the strait and head home themselves! The grass always being greener on the other side and all of that.... There proves to be nowhere to anchor, so we head on again.

This time, we decide to take the narrow inner route through Kyrkesund. We come to a tiny channel formed by a gully between two high cliffs. High above us, perched rather precariously on the smooth granite rocks we saw a flock of sheep.




I was worried that they might slip on the smooth shiny rocks, but they trotted around very confidently. The boat traffic was again very tight and it was quite stressful to be forced to do these acrobatic twists and turns around marker buoys while at the same time trying to avoid big, wide sailing and motor boats heading in both directions.




On shore, being a fine Sunday in July, the place was packed with people who arrived by boat and ferry and were lining up in the cafés and restaurants, outside the summer houses or just walking along the piers watching the sailing boats go by.




Apparently, this is nothing compared to the crowd they get here when the big boat race Tjörn Runt takes place in July. One cannot move that weekend for the crowd. I’m glad I’ll be missing that!

Yes, it is narrow and tight and very busy, but on a clear summer’s day, it is still very picturesque with the sun shining on the water and reflecting off the cliffs and the shore lined with former seamen’s cottages now renovated into summer homes.




As we were sailing at a nice, easy pace we could linger a little and look more closely at the homes on the shore. On front of many of the homes were private piers, with all kinds of boats bobbing in the water. Each section of the sound had its own unique character and there was a big variety of house size and types which made it quite interesting.




Among my favourites were the tiny little homes, some no more than a small room, but each built on the water with a fabulous view of the passing parade of boats all summer long. Mind you, I did wonder what it would be like here on a cold, dark autumn or winter day, though today, thoughts of that time of the year were far away as people fired up their bbq and set the table for a sunny lunch.




There are also some quite large homes and I dread to think what one of these might cost. I can't believe that these homes, worth many millions are only used in the summer. In winter these days, this is a ghost town. In previous years, this whole area was a busy fishing and cargo port as the high island provided shelter from the ever present westerly winds. It all looks so peaceful here that it's hard to believe that on the other side of the island, the North Sea sweeps in against the shore.




We saw quite a bit of criss crossing at one particular point in the sound and discovered that many people were trying to moor outside of a pier restaurant, which apparently has a high reputation. Magasinet was built in an old grain and fish storehouse dating from the mid nineteenth which has been renovated. It looked really busy today as boats jostled to get a good mooring place. What an outstanding location.




All too soon, we were through the sound and back in the open water, sailing steadily along the island of Tjörn. We have previously visited the island by car and loved all of the tiny communities there. We drove along small roads to these fishing villages and stood on the cliffs looking out at the sea with the bare islands in the distance and made a vow to ourselves to come here one day and sail our own boat. That was five years ago and here we are - though it is not as much fun to be actually in the sea as it was looking at it all from land. One of my very favourite towns on Tjörn is the beautiful, rocky harbour at Skärhamn.




This town has about 3,000 permanent inhabitants and many, many thousand more in the summer. The harbour was packed and the boat traffic was really intensive as we .... yes you guessed it.... passed by. It would have been insane to have tried and squeeze in today. I kept thinking back five years to that cool, quiet day in late September when we sat at a waterfront café for lunch and enjoyed the peace and tranquility of the town. We then went for a walk to the cliffs and looked across the water at the fairytale island of Åstol and wondered what it would be like on a summer's day. Well, we have our answer! Insane. Another illusion bites the dust.

The rest of the day, we sail to the west of Marstrand, looking for a place to drop anchor for the night. The choices are few and far between. Around Marstrand itself, enormous boats full of young men, all well lubricated with beer have taken over the guest harbours so we give that a wide berth. There are several bays on the nature reserve of Klåverön, just south of Marstrand, but they are completely open to the south west (the prevailing wind direction) so they are not suitable for a night harbour.

We find ourselves heading further and further south in our quest. One possible bay, Utkäften, must have had at least 40 boats moored with more heading in - and it wasn't even a very big place! When I asked Lars-Göran why everyone would cram themselves into the same bay, he answered "Well, what other choices are there around here?" And that was very true. The mainland just to the east was shallow and quite open to the sea and there were very few islands. The island groups between here and Göteborg were all built up with holiday homes, private piers and nowhere to moor. In the end, we went back to the same place (Stora Hästholmen) where we stayed the first night we spent in Göteborg.




It's peaceful here. We do see some boats passing in the distance, but it seems that this area is not so popular and we are quite alone. I can't believe how far south we've had to come and we talk a little about where to go from here. I feel as though we have barely touched the places we wanted to see, but I can see that July is not the time to do it. I think that we hadn't expected to be back at this point until mid August, so we feel a little dissatisfied and at a loose end. Should we try and head north again tomorrow or just forget about it and look at the Göteborg archipelago instead. Perhaps it may be less crowded than Bohuslän.



I guess we'll sleep on it.