Ssh! It’s Bokö

We were sailing downwind out towards the open sea, slowly. And— since the wind had turned during the night— straight into annoyingly big leftover waves.

“This is terrible! It’s making me sick!” O said, with a reasonable amount of desperation in his voice.

It really was. The going wasn’t that rough, but it was uncomfortable, wobbly— and slow!

“Yeah, this is no good,” I replied. “Let’s just turn back to the inside fairway, it will be much easier there.”

A short while later, and we were again on the inside of the outermost small islets, and away from the mischievous waves.

The weather was a bit gray. Not pretty and sunny, like the day before, but rather damp and monotonic. None of us felt the spontaneous desire to break out the music and the dance moves, in other words.

We were making good downwind progress, however. And good sailing, with enough wind (but not too much wind), that is always fun.

Also so when you are faster than the other boats, and we were!

After about twenty miles of gratifying inshore sailing, we decided where to go for the evening: to a well-protected anchorage next to a small and dreamy island called Bokö.

Bokö

Bokö is a nature reserve, where the composition of both flora and fauna has been largely preserved since (at least) the mid 20th century. Sheep, cows, grassy paths, and old roundpole fences. As idyllic and authentic as it gets, one could say!

After we were securely anchored just a bit outside of the reserve, we took the dinghy in with Little L and M, to have a look.

On the dock, we met and had a nice chat with another Hanse-owning couple (“Hey! Are YOU the Naked Sailor? Wow! We’ve read the blog!”), and after that, we took a path leading towards the inner parts of the island. We had heard the sound of sheep from the boat, and now we were on a mission to find them.

And that we did!

“We love this place,” M and Little L said. “This is even better than the zoo!”

Denmark vs England

Once back on the boat, it was football time again. It was Denmark playing England for a place in the cup final, so a really exciting match. And even more so for our anchoring neighbor, we thought, since we had seen a Danish flag on it.

I started the engine to charge the batteries for a while, and we sat down to watch it.

“Mikkel Damsgard scores and it is 1-0 for Denmark!”

The Danish crowd went wild.

But then nine minutes later. “Harry Kane to Saka. Saka sends the ball across [the whole crowd takes a breath, ready to burst out], Simon Kjaer touches it, and IT’S A GOAL!”.

Time for the English crowd to explode. 1-1 equal.

The engine had been on for a while, so I went out to turn it off.

Ssh!

When I got up into the cockpit I saw a man standing on the Danish boat, frantically waving towards me. I turned off the engine, and waved back to him.

“YOU SHOULD NOT DO THAT!” he shouted at me.

I immediately understood what he meant. It was late in the evening, and I had been running the engine to charge the batteries. Although the sound hadn’t seemed that loud, it was obvious that we had been disturbing them.

“OH! I’M REALLY SORRY!” I shouted back. “I JUST NEEDED SOME CHARGE FOR THE ANCHOR LIGHT,” I continued, but then I immediately felt a bit bad about having used that as an excuse. The charging was, of course, also for the anchor light, but not just for that. We were, after all, watching a football game on a laptop, using cabin lights, storing food in a cold fridge, and so forth. A lot of energy consumption, unfortunately powered by diesel fuel.

“WELL, YOU SHOULD NOT DO THAT!” he shouted again, not angrily, not happily, just somewhat matter-of-factly.

“YES, I’M SORRY! I’M SORRY!” I shouted back.

And then we waved politely goodbye to each other, and went back inside.

I joked with the others, that maybe part of his frustration had more to do with the tight situation in the football game, than with me running the engine. Sincerely, though, it was all my bad, and I shouldn’t have done it so late. I should have remembered to start the engine a bit earlier, when we were still sailing towards our anchorage. 

Before falling asleep that night, I thought a lot about this. That we didn’t have any way of generating battery power without running the engine. We’ll have to do something about that, I told myself, while drifting away into that and other dreams.

The Track

The complete trip data can be viewed over here: https://charlotte.lc/boats/2zGrCQC2X9X2LbkzMhFm/trips/3u9B5Ilo2s0mhvXa5irx