Spring skerries near Stockholm

14 April 2024 · Stockholm archipelago · ~4 min read

A friend of a friend has a small motorboat that lives, most of the year, under a blue tarp on a slip near Vaxholm. In early April she sends a message to a handful of people who like the water more than is reasonable for the time of year, and on a Saturday morning we meet at a kiosk for coffee and a quick check of the weather.

This year there were four of us. The wind was four metres per second from the north, which is more than nothing and less than a problem. The water was four degrees, which is exactly the temperature at which one stops volunteering to swim. We pulled the tarp off the boat, drained a small amount of rainwater from somewhere it should not have been, and motored out at a polite eight knots.

The water was very flat for about an hour. Then it was not.

The middle hour

The skerries east of Stockholm are not dramatic in the way that, say, the Norwegian fjords are dramatic. They are low, grey-pink granite, with a thin coat of pines that lean inland because the wind always comes from somewhere. In summer there are houses on the slightly bigger islands; in April there are mostly birds. We saw a pair of eider, a great number of cormorants, and one swan that flew low across the bow and surprised everyone, including itself.

We stopped on a small island whose name I did not catch and spent forty minutes there with a thermos of coffee and a packet of cinnamon biscuits. There was an old wooden ladder leading down to a small jetty that had clearly been repaired with whatever was at hand. Someone before us had stacked a small pile of dry firewood under a tarp, the way you sometimes find in the archipelago — left for the next person without much ceremony.

On the way back the wind picked up. Not a lot, but enough that the spray became a feature of the experience. I sat at the front with a camera in a plastic bag and managed two photographs that were not blurred. The other one is in the gallery; this one isn't.

The boat is fine. The boat is always fine. I borrowed a thermos that day and never returned it; if you're reading this and it was yours, write.