HappyWanderer.org

Hi Friends,

I had a lot of fun reading your messages.  Thank you!

We are in Norway!  We found a sandy beach and we saw lots of interesting shells and one bone.  Some were razor clam shells.  In the water there are jellyfish.  I made a sand castle with a bridge and Sophie made a wading pool.  I also see a lot of trees on shore.

The city where we are is called Oslo.  It is very very hot.  Our first day here we walked all around. Then we changed clothes and we were allowed to go in the fountains.  In there Karla and I played tag and there were lots of other children too.

We went to a festival.  In part of the festival many people were dressed up like in the Viking times.  We saw people dancing and they showed a hand that meant we could dance with them.  We also made balls of wool.  You take apart the fluffy wool and you put it in soapy water.  (If you don’t have the special kind of soap you can use shampoo.)  You roll and roll and roll the ball between your hands until it feels very hard.  It is sticky and you have to wait until it dries.  We also made viking bread and ate it with honey.  It was really really good with the honey but my hands got sort of sticky.  We jumped on the moon bounce too.  There was kind of a slide moon bounce and one next to it that was not a slide.  It was where you just jumped.  We went to a circus at the festival.  It was amazing because there was one girl who was on two ropes and she did very fancy tricks.  She even stood on the rope and went upside down.  There were also two clowns.

We also saw a book store and it was all in Norwegian.  We found three books that we liked.  One is a Spot book and we guess what the words are and what the story is from the pictures.

I hope you are having fun.

Your friend,  Maria

Hi Friends,

It is sunny but cold sometimes.  We are in Lysekil, Sweden.  There is an aquarium here with fish and things that live in the water here.  In the petting tank we saw a sea cucumber, star fish, crab and a mermaid’s purse which really came from a shark.  A man was talking in Swedish and a little bit in English so we could learn.  One fish in the aquarium was a huge bluish fish that grows new teeth every year when the old ones are worn down.  It looked scary to me.  On our boat we sometimes see lots of little fish near the dock.  I even found two little starfish one day and lots of mussels.

It is really rocky here.  On the islands there are prickly bushes.  We try not to walk on them so we don’t get prickled.  There are some sandy places and some muddy places, but mostly rocky.  We anchored at a nature reserve.  We got to see rams (daddy sheep) with horns.  They were too scared of us for us to pet them.

The biggest city was Gothenborg.  There was a ship museum.  We went in a submarine.  We pretended we really lived on it. We went on a freighter with a model of a captain.  It was a giant ship.  Another day we went to the zoo and petted the goats.

Today we are going to a library.  We are hoping there will be an English section.  We are also going to bring an English book and look for the same book in Swedish to try to read Swedish.

Is it sunny and warm or cold and rainy?  Have you been finding interesting things or not?

Love, Maria

Dear Friends,

Thanks for the e-mail.  It was fun reading it. 

We are in Copenhagen.  There is a museum with two floors with amber rocks.  There were magnifying glasses over amber with insects.  The signs were in English, Danish and German.  Long long ago when trees got cut resin came out.  Insects got stuck in it.  Then the trees got covered by water.  The resin turned into amber.

In a park we saw spinny things like there are at school behind Heritage House.  There were three in a row and Karla Sophie and I didn’t have to take turns.In Denmark there is a queen and there are three guards in front of her palace.  We didn’t see the queen but we  saw the changing of the guard.  The guards did a little parade and we heard their shoes clomp clomp clomp on the cobblestones.  Then they said something and they changed.  The ones on the sidewalk went to where the ones on the street were and those went to the sidewalk.  Then some left. 

We went to a museum and there is a place where children can play with dress-ups and a pretend Viking ship with shields on the sides of it and pretend swords.  Karla, Sophie and I dressed up like Vikings.  The Vikings used their boats and sailed many places. They even sailed to North America and met Indians.  In one place in the museum they have other dress-ups and shoes you can put on.  There is a grocery store with a balance scale for weighing food too. 

Today we are going to Humlebaek.  Soon we will be in Sweden. 

I hope you are having a great time.

Love, Maria

We’re quickly learning about Danish fishing Harbors.  We’re used to the East Coast approach to harbor building: find a navigable river or stream, dredge it out a bit if need be, and sprinkle it with marinas and moorings.  Lots of room and shelter from the wind.  Not so in these parts.  Often the only shelter is an artificial harbor, so we haven’t anchored as often as we did Down East.  These tiny harbors are rings of stone and riprap, set out from the shore a bit into deeper water and connected to dry land via a causeway.  Space is at a premium, boats are small, and the fishermen know how to handle their boats, hence the docks and pilings are packed in tightly. 

This is a good time to talk about the favored Baltic mooring method: “The Box”.  Start with a long wooden dock or stone quay, and parallel to that set a line of pilings a boat length away and a boat width apart.  The idea is to squeeze your boat in between two of the pilings, then nose up to the dock.  Two lines hold the stern to the pilings, and two more hold the bow to the dock.  You board the boat by crawling over the anchor and the bow pulpit.  The upside of this is that you can fit more boats in than if there were finger piers between all of the boats.  The downside is that most of the boxes are only 3.5 to 4 meters wide (the distance between the pilings).  Happy Wanderer is 4.2 meters wide, and therefore won’t fit into most of the boxes.  So far this has not been a problem: it’s early in the season and we can usually find a quay to lie alongside.

Case in point is our visit to Onsevig Havn, a tiny harbor surrounded by wind turbines (Yes, we’re also learning that the wind turbines are located where it’s windiest…).  When we left Bagenkop, we close-reached all afternoon and anchored for the night in the lee of an island near Nakskov.  Early the next day, we set out for Onsevig in brisk winds.  The wind and chop picked up as we rounded Lolland into the Smålands Farvandet, the shallow sound between Lolland and Sjaelland.  By the time we got near Onsevig the wind was touching 30 knots.

The nice thing about harbors in a place without much tidal range is that the seawalls aren’t that high. We were able to sneak up to the entrance and peek inside.  Not good.  What little quay there was had fishing boats tied up to it, and the boxes were way too small.  There was almost no space to turn around: if we went in, we had to stay in.  To top it off, the wind was quartering across the entrance, trying to blow us back out and sideways into the seawall at the same time.  This meant that we would have to motor in at a brisk clip to avoid fetching up against the seawall.  The only logical spot was just inside the entrance, practically hanging outside.  We wouldn’t have to risk turning around in the harbor, and we’d be sheltered there.Plan in place, we motored back out into the bay, set up all of our lines and fenders (big rubber beach balls that we hang over the side to protect the boat from damage), and took a deep breath.  Then in we went at 3/4 throttle, full reverse once inside to slow us down, and let the wind surge us up against the quay.  We bounced harmlessly on the five fenders, and the wind clamped Happy Wanderer against the rough concrete of the quay while we trussed her in place with doubled dock lines.Deep breath all around.

Not a soul in sight, just the wind to keep us company.  

We were making fairy houses on Sunday.  To build a fairy house, you need things that you find nearby, not like garbage or plastic.  You can use driftwood, rocks, shells, sticks, seaweed, but not garbage.  We sailed to Nakskov Fjord yesterday, but it was bumpy because the waves got high and the wind was blowing hard.  I miss you.  Sometimes I think about you at math time during boat school. 
Love, Maria