Where am I?

While my wife is out-of-town I decided to explore more of the Stockholm archipelago. Back in 2000, on my first job assignment here, I visited quite a few islands including Sandhamn and Möja. This past weekend I decided to go to Finnhamn to kayak. P., a buddy from work, was visiting on a business trip so he joined me. This is a story of us being lost and found and lost again and found again.

We wanted to rent kayaks but they were all rented out. (I did call twice to reserve the day before but the line was busy or so they said.....) So we rented a tiny motor boat with a 4 horsepower motor. After having a 20 minute ordeal of getting it cranked, off we go, hugging the shoreline of Finnhamn. By following the shoreline we reasoned there'd be no way we'd get lost. We also had a map but the coves and bays were hard to correlate with the map. Some places were difficult to see whether they were part of the island or maybe another island really close. We concluded, too, that the map simply left off some of the really small islands. That should have been a clue.

Two hours later we are tolally confused. Where was Paradise Bay, which we were told was very beautiful? Had we somehow missed it? Did we miss a channel somewhere? Finally, in desparation we went up to a house. The owner came out and met us at the dock. He was a bit incredulous when we said we were lost and trying to get back to Finnhamn where we started. He laughed and asked us to look behind us: "there's the Finnhamn dock hardly a half a kilometer away." We looked at the map in amazement. I thought we were on the opposite side of the island and P. thought we were still in another place. Wow.

So we decided to stay "close" and just park the boat on some of the small islands and explore them on foot. Nice and safe.

After several islands we decided it was time to return the boat. The person that rented the boat to us said there was 4 hours worth of gas. We checked the tank when we left and it was full. Apparently though, he was wrong. The motor went silent and we were sourrounded 360 degrees by islands that all looked the same. No distictive landmarks and all the houses we saw were the classic Swedish red with white trim. The only possible markers were two signs that had "8" on them and a red bouy and a green bouy.

So we called the phone number written on the life vests. I happened to mention there were two signs with the number "8" on them. "Ahh!" he says. "You're 200 meters from the rental dock. Do you have the oars?"

Yes, we had oars so we rowed in. Again, we were amazed that we could be so lost when trying not to be and yet be so close to where we wanted to be.

I think I need a Garmin.



You can find photos (more than you probably want to view in my Stockholm Archipelago collection. Within the collection, you'll find Finnhamn where I got lost. You'll also find Ornö where I spent three hours biking around. The other sets within the collection represent other trips or just the boat ride itself going out into the archipelago. Kayaking in Björkvik was nice, too.