Sailing the Skagerak/Kattegat towards Gothenburg: Gothenburg

This weekend we did a sailing trip, 103 nm. The first part of the journey is covered here, I did a careful study on the way to reaffirm that the earth is indeed globular (I think it is a bit important - there are plenty of people out there claiming it's flat), and we spent one night at the island Källö-Knippla, where I got surprised due to the density of cars. That's very close to Gothenburg indeed, so the third post will be only on Gothenburg and the surrounding areas. I didn't get time to take photos, but we passed an island Kalven on the way, maybe that's a good candidate for a next visit; it's an even smaller island, and there is a big car park on the other side of the ferry line, so probably the island itself is indeed without cars.

In Gothenburg, we decided to stop relatively centrally and then continue by dhingy to the Volvo Ocean Race village. It seems like we did the right choice; the dhingy was too heavily loaded to go planing with three heavy men and one small child onboard, so it's nice we took the big boat so far up the river. It was pretty much impossible to land with a big boat, even with the small boat we got chased away ... but I'll make a separate post on the Volvo Ocean Race shortly. Here are some photos from Gothenburg ...

Wow ... "battery powered" ...

We went down the river to watch the Port race, then up a bit to let the first crew member off. The best thing to do would have been to circle around in the river with the big boat and using the small boat to get in land. We did the worst thing possible. "There is a nice spot to land the boat", I said. Well, it wasn't. It was a breakwater, not connected to land. Oh well, we'll just use the dhingy to get from the breakwater to the land. It was not possible to get the big boat on the inside of the breakwater. It didn't even occur to me that it was a breakwater ... who needs a breakwater in the middle of a river? Oh right, there were some waves there - I wouldn't want to stay there for long time, but just for throwing off some passengers it was a pretty OK place, I thought.

Well, the disembarking crew were not ready to leave the boat yet, they needed some minutes for packing. Then all of a sudden it started raining heavily and there was strong wind gusts. The disembarking crew wanted to stay some few minutes, waiting for the worst rain to pass. And then, all of a sudden, came the waves.

When waves and wind goes against the current, for instance up the river mouth, the waves can grow quite big, in this case they were like 1.5 metres high. We were two persons working full time on pushing the boat to keep it away from the breakwater. Fenders didn't help much, even if I have really big fenders, they were jumping out of the water all the time. The third person that should jump off together with the child didn't know what to do - eventually we decided it was best to be three adults working to get the boat out from there and then put off the disembarking crew somewhere else. The child started crying and everything was bad. I think the boat got relatively unharmed from it, but I'm considering to give it one more layer of varnish before our summer vacation. We lost quite some time due to this. So the crew disembarking first probably did manage to catch their bus, but would we manage to catch our train? The plan was to anchor up the boat outside Gothenburg, unfortunately we had to go relatively far to find a relatively sheltered place for it.

We did waste quite some time while throwing anchor ... when we finally had anchored up and managed to leave the boat, it was obvious - no, we would not manage to catch the train. There were buses going, but for me that wasn't an option for various reasons, I stayed behind and left Monday afternoon.

Here is the boat, as we left it:

On the way up to Gothenburg we went through "Eskils kanal", it was a very charming channel, but I didn't get the chance to take photos. Then, just as we were passing Saltholmen, it started raining very heavily again (forecast promised sunshine and no more rain), so we left the dhingy there and continued our journey by tram. My crew were wearing "proper" clothes, as I'm sweating a lot I prefer not to wear anything water tight ... I was thoroughly wet both from salt water and fresh water when arriving to Gothenburg and freezing a bit. So my last crew departured by bus back to Oslo, and I headed back to the boat to sleep, clean a bit and do some other work.

I need a good camera with zoom eventually, I'm quite tired of trying to take photos of "spectacular things" and then I can't even see what was spectacular when looking through the photos ...

The tractor ...

... well, maybe it doesn't look that spectacular on the photo, but to me it seemed like if it had been trying to climb out from the ferry.

I waited a bit to let the ferry pass, but eventually I was much faster than the ferry ... so I had to g a bit, slow down and wait, go a bit ... there is this thing with this dhingy (and most planing boats), it has only two "good" speeds, one is very slow and the other one is quite fast. Anything between, and the boat is stuck climbing an uphill - the energy from the engine is providing bow waves rather than speed. I felt I was so close to the ferry, yet when looking at the photo it seems so far away ...

I met one of the racing boats in the river ... (actually two, but photographed only one)

Amazingly many waves in the river. It was good getting into the channels finally. Here is one of the nicer channel bridges ...

This is the only other boat I saw in the channels

... but some few places there are actually proper provisions for arrival by boat.

Can I leave the dhingy here for a week? At least, there are no signs anywhere telling that mooring is not allowed, at the other hand I can't see anyone else mooring up anywhere, and the only thing I could attach the boat to was a rescue ladder. Oh well, some people are parking their bikes on public land, others their cars ... and yet others have dhingies to park ...

I went up from the dhingy by the central stations. Now I'm not so good at directions, and I got a little bit lost while walking around in Göteborg ... but all the time I found the channel, found a familiar bridge or other sight, and then I knew: the central station is in that direction! :-)

All photos available in better resolution on IPFS QmNSKL9M8uDvSAvbxSaXpH16GdycCkcNji6kXab6JxwVyd. License: CC BY-SA 4.0