Sailing in Southern Scandinavia: 406 Places to Tie up Your Boat in the Skagerrak, Kattegat and Baltic Sea. With A Newcomer's Guide to Sailing in Scandinavia

Most of this book is is a guide to places where you can tie your boat up for the night, as you sail around southern Scandinavia. Specifically the Skagerrak and Kattegat, and the Baltic coasts of Sweden and Finland. It details 406 guest harbours, anchorages and, in particular, wee rocky bays, where you can find mooring.It starts in the Oslo Fjord and works down the coast of Sweden. It touches on the Danish and German Baltic, then travels up the east coast of Sweden and along the south coast of Finland, as far as the Russian border. It ends with a look at some inland Swedish canals and lakes. Each harbour and anchorage takes up one page. As well as a description, there is a small map showing where to tie up, a location map, a waypoint and some photos of the place.This is the only harbour guide on this area published in English. There's pilot books and navigation aids. But there's nothing else, in English, showing you the astonishing variety of rocky harbours and anchorages in this fantastic sailing ground, of thousands of islands. In the era of Google translate, language isn't an insurmountable problem. There's certainly much more comprehensive harbour guides in the Scandinavian languages. But it's still quite comforting to have information in a language you can actually speak, don't you think?Before the specific harbours, the first part of this volume is a fifty page general guide to sailing in Scandinavia. It’s designed for people who know roughly what they are doing on a boat, but aren’t used to the particular conditions found in this part of the world.The book consists of information gleaned by me, over more than a decade, from my exploration of these cruising grounds in my little old long-keeler. I've tried to be reasonably objective, but this is one bloke's experience, not the work of a committee. So, inevitably, it's partial, incomplete, inaccurate, anecdotal, biased, derivative, idiosyncratic, unoriginal, unreliable, often abusive, and flippant. I hope it's amusing in places. After all, sailing is supposed to be a bit of fun.It’s basically intended for insecure, English speaking wimps wanting to sail in Scandinavia, who are lacking in confidence but resigned to running into the odd rock occasionally. It replaces my much shorter previous book '165 Rocks'. The original harbours are still there. Mostly not updated. As I say this is one person's cruising experience. But there's another 241 places to tie up your boat in the new volume. These are gathered from my experiences up to October 2024.With cost in mind, I've redrawn all the maplets, so that they work in monochrome. So whilst the 165 rocks came at a cost of 14p each (that's €0.16 to you), in the new paperback you get a harbour for 3.6 pence (€0.047). Now that's what I call value! Come on, what can you get for under four pence?The electronic, Kindle edition still has colour photos and is a lot cheaper. Being a 'print replica' book, with a page per harbour, you can't change font size and so on, like you can with a normal Kindle book. Neither do Kindle's 'contents' pages work well. But this electronic version might be useful for cutting and pasting the waypoint coordinates for individual harbours.There's a hardback version for those who find Amazon paper covers a little flimsy. Inevitably a bit pricier, but you'd still only need to save one night in a proper marina, to get your money back.If you do get to sail in these waters, I hope you enjoy them as much as I have, and that at least a few of my recommendations prove useful.Happy Sailing. Read more