Sunday, August 30, 2015

Seals

On our summer vacation sailing trip to Norway we saw quite a few seals in the water; more than all the other years taken together...

One evening, when we were mored on the rocks of the beautiful skerry Lindholmen/Norway, I just came on deck to take a last bit of the beautiful evening nature in, when I saw some unusual patterns of water movement. For a very short moment a seal was showing it's head, then dived again. Fish were jumping out of the water and from the pattern of the water movement we concluded that the seal hunted the fish by swimming in circles. It was a very exciting observation which lasted only a few minutes.

Anyway it is rather tricky to take pictures of these sweeties, since they are gone almost every time, I had the camera ready....therefore only a few snapshots were taken, these rest we have to keep in our memories ;-)


Danemark-Ulön/Sweden - 08/03/2015

On the second day of our summer vacation we already experienced the full beauty of the skerry landscape.

We had a very nice sailing trip passing the City of Lysekil and traveling through the Sotten-Chanel.
Up there in the North it was already off-season and we were quite happy that everything was less crowded and calmer.

Again we were very impressed and touched by the rock formations. Behind Lysekil the stones changed their color to relish and became very smooth and rounded.
Hugo insisted to stand at the bow the whole day, although the sun was burning down on him....At one point I a wet scarf around his head to cool his little brain a bit and he seemed to like that :-)

Early evening we anchored at a bay at the nature reserve Dannemark-Ulön and simply enjoyed being in nature for the rest of the day.


Stocken/Sweden - 08/02/2015

At the beginning of August we finally started for our summer vacation.
A few weeks earlier Wolfgang and his cousin took care of bringing Madita to North Denmark to give us a chance to reach Norway and go back unhurriedly during the 3 and a half weeks time we are going to have....
We started from Frederikshavn/Denmark going North first. Our plan was to peek around the corner at Skagen to figure out how bad the Skagerrak with all it's waves would be....well the wind is coming from the west with 4-5 Beaufort.....when reaching the Skagerrak we spontaneously decided that the West Skerries of Sweden are perfect for the beginning, changed our course and ran for Stocken/Sweden. It was a good decision, as on every first longer trip everybody felt slightly seasick with no sealers to speak of yet. On open sea it was still pretty shaking, but once we reached the skerries all the sudden the waves calmed down and the last stretch towards Stocken was very pleasant :-)
We have been to Stocken twice before, a very calm little harbor with an excellent seafood shop ;-)