Round the Skaw | Logbook

I

The Flight In

Rogaland from the air

You arrive at a coast like this from above, which is the one view you never get again once you are on it.

Date: 24 August 2019
Frames: Two, out of a window

Back to top

II

Stavanger

58°58′N · Vågen

A cathedral town that became an oil capital, arranged around one inlet with the quays built out over the water.

Founded: 1125
Town rights: 1425
Population: 150,123
Old town: About 170 wooden houses
Oil directorate: Here since 1972

The inlet the town is named after

Vågen is the inlet off Byfjorden that Stavanger grew around, and the Old Norse Stafangr is usually read as the name of this water — stafr, a staff, probably for the cliff of Valberget on its east side, plus angr, an inlet. The quays were built out in the early 1900s; the quay line at the head now stands some twenty-five metres further out than it did in the nineteenth century.

Oil came ashore here

Stavanger became the shore base of the Norwegian continental shelf after oil was found in the North Sea in 1969. The Storting created the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate on 14 July 1972 and put it in Stavanger; Equinor's head office sits at Forus on the city's southern edge with about six thousand staff. The herring town that grew tenfold between 1815 and 1880 did the same trick twice.

Back to top

III

Out Through the Skerries

Byfjorden → the open coast

Lines off at a quarter past eight, out under the city bridge, and an hour of islands before the land runs out of shelter.

Slipped: 25 August, 08:14
City bridge: 185 m span, 26 m clearance
Opened: 31 January 1978

The first thing you pass under

Stavanger bybru crosses Strømsteinsundet from Kjelvene, over Grasholmen, to Sølyst. It is 1,067 metres long overall with a 185-metre main span and twenty-six metres of clearance, and when it opened on 31 January 1978 it was Norway's first cable-stayed bridge. It is still the longest in Rogaland.

Back to top

IV

Down the Lee Shore

Jæren

For sixty-five kilometres Norway stops doing what Norway does. The islands end, the fjords end, and the coast runs straight and low with nothing to duck behind.

Coast: About 65 km, Tungenes to Brusand
Låg-Jæren: 700 km², Norway's largest plain
Jærens rev: Shoal, 2 nm offshore
Least depth: 3.5 m at Klausgrunnen
Recorded wrecks: 394

Why this stretch is different

Jæren is the low coastal district south of the Boknafjord, and Låg-Jæren is Norway's largest lowland plain at about seven hundred square kilometres. Unlike almost the whole Norwegian coast there are very few offshore islands and few fjords cutting in; south of Sola the shoreline runs nearly straight. Blown sand in the north, and in the south a near-continuous bank of cobbles thrown up by the surf.

A lee shore with a reef on it

Jærens rev is a partly stony sandbank running almost two nautical miles west of Revtangen, and a mile and a half out at Klausgrunnen there is still only three and a half metres of water. The US Sailing Directions mark the ground off here as a Dangerous Wave Area where depths swing between sixteen and forty metres and swell from south-west through north-west builds observed breakers. Erik Bakkevig counted 394 recorded wrecks along this coast. A rescue station stood at Reve from 1852 to 1993.

The lights they built for it

Eigerøy, 1854, was the first cast-iron lighthouse tower in Norway — 32.9 metres, the light 46.5 metres above high water, visible nearly nineteen miles. It went up after four wrecks off Egersund between 1843 and 1851 killed forty people, and the lighthouse service, unsure the iron would stand, lined the whole tower internally with seventy thousand bricks. Feistein, 1859, was cheaper and nearly killed its keeper: in 1868 the sea broke clean over the holm and took him and a servant girl.

Back to top

V

Up the Mast

Eikundarsund

Somebody has to go and look. Flat water, an hour before the harbour, and a bosun's chair.

Sound: 13 km, Eigerøya to the mainland
Nysund: 40 m wide
Bridge: 20 August 1951
Clearance: 23.75 m

The way in from the north-west

Eigerøya is separated from the mainland by a sound thirteen kilometres long, the Eikundarsund of the sagas, which is where the town's name comes from. The inner north-western entrance is Nysund, forty metres wide, crossed by the Eigerøy bridge — opened by Crown Prince Olav on 20 August 1951, 260 metres long, a 40-metre centre span, 23.75 metres of clearance. The harbour authority's own pilotage note calls the southern entrance, Søragapet, the main one; this is the back door.

Back to top

VI

Egersund

58°27′N · Vågen

The only good natural harbour on the whole coast between Flekkefjord and Stavanger, and a town that has burned down six times.

Town rights: 18 July 1798
Population: 11,902
Town fires: Six, 1817 to 1961
Tidal range: Effectively none
Quay: About 4,500 m, 6–9 m deep
Faience works: 1847–1979

A harbour with no tide

Egersund sits on a bay off the sound between Eigerøya and the mainland, and there is effectively no tidal range at all — the town lies at an amphidromic point, where the tide cancels itself out. The harbour is ice-free year round with about four and a half kilometres of quay at six to nine metres. Spring herring built the place; when the herring failed in the 1960s the fleet turned to other stocks and the fishmeal and fish-oil plants became the backbone of the port.

Six fires and a grid

Egersund has burned in 1817, 1843, 1859, 1862, 1896 and 1961. The 1843 fire took two thirds of the town and left several hundred homeless, and the rebuilding followed a new plan of straight streets at right angles. After 1859 and 1862 burned the same quarter twice, the streets were made deliberately wide so that fire could not cross them. That is why a timber town of twelve thousand people has boulevards.

The pottery that employed everyone

Johan Feyer founded Egersunds Potteri in 1847 on English clay-working methods, importing English craftsmen to train local hands; it was the town's first industry. Faience proper began in 1867, and the works grew from twenty-six hands in 1851 to about four hundred by 1912, the second largest industrial plant in Rogaland. Production ended in 1979. The site is now a shopping centre with a museum to the pottery inside it.

Back to top

VII

The Night Leg

Egersund → Kristiansand

Out again at twenty to ten with the light going, and this far south in August the dark is real. Eight hours of it, and the sun back at eight minutes past seven.

Away: 25 August, 21:41
Sun back: 26 August, 07:08
Dark: About eight hours of it

The difference latitude makes

This is the same boat and much the same crew as the Svalbard passage, nine and a half degrees further south and a month later in the year. There the sun never went down at all. Here it goes down at ten to nine, stays down, and you stand a watch in the dark with a compass light and somebody else's shoulder next to you. Nothing about the sailing is harder. It simply stops being strange.

Back to top

VIII

Kristiansand

58°08′N · Agder

A town a king drew on paper in 1641 and ordered the merchants of Agder to move into. The grid is still there.

Founded: 5 July 1641
By: Christian IV
Plan approved: 6 May 1642
Population: 67,920
Denmark ferry since: 1872

A town as a rectangle

Hans Jacobsen Schiørts drew the grid for the king and it was approved on 6 May 1642: five long streets, eight cross streets, every street the same width of twenty-four alen, every block ninety-six by a hundred and ninety-two. Pine forest was still standing in the middle of the plan until it was felled in 1685. The fire of 1892 took the south-eastern half, which was rebuilt in obligatory masonry; the timber quarter that survived to the north is Posebyen.

The link to Denmark

There has been a ferry between Kristiansand and Denmark since 1872, when DS Frithjof ran to Frederikshavn, and the port is formally part of European route E39, which picks up again on the far side at Hirtshals. It is Norway's second largest ferry terminal: in 2022 it took 1,059 calls and just under 1.4 million passengers. Color Line has run the Hirtshals crossing with SuperSpeed 1 since 2008, three and a quarter hours at up to thirty-one knots.

Back to top

IX

The Skagerrak

Norway → the Skaw

Until the Eider Canal opened in 1784 this was the only way in or out of the Baltic. It has been crowded ever since.

Length: 240 km
Width: 80–140 km
Maximum depth: Over 700 m
Deepest: Off Arendal
Vessels, 2013: About 7,500

The trench underneath

The sea shoals gently from the Danish side and then falls away steeply toward Norway into the Norwegian Trench, an elongated depression fifty to ninety-five kilometres wide running from Stad to the Oslofjord. Off Rogaland it is 250 to 300 metres deep; off Arendal it reaches about seven hundred, against a North Sea average of roughly a hundred. It was cut by rivers in the late Tertiary and deepened by ice streams. It is not a subduction trench, whatever the name suggests.

Why it has a reputation

The US Sailing Directions designate a large Dangerous Wave Area across the north-west Skagerrak. The westerly coastal current dominates, south-westerly swell refracts over the Norwegian Trench and again over the steeply shelving seabed inshore, and where wave meets current it breaks. The same publication warns that in heavy gales the sea often breaks over ground with less than forty metres of water. On the Danish side the current sets east at half a knot to a knot and a half, and three or four in a storm.

Two waters, going opposite ways

A salt undercurrent runs in through the Skagerrak toward the Kattegat and the Baltic while a brackish surface current runs out over the top of it — the Baltic Current, which becomes the Norwegian Coastal Current. You are sailing on water leaving the Baltic and over water going into it.

Back to top

X

Into Sweden

57°39′N · Göteborg

The rock changes nationality and loses its trees. Then a green bridge, and the largest port in the Nordics behind it.

Archipelago: Entirely car-free
Residents: 5,000, and 6,000 in summer
Bridge opened: 8 November 1966
Main span: 417 m
Clearance: 45 m over 100 m width
Port calls: Over 11,000 a year

Islands without cars

The southern Gothenburg archipelago — Asperö, Brännö, Köpstadsö, Styrsö, Donsö, Vrångö — is entirely car-free, and the city's own tourist board states it flatly. About five thousand people live there permanently and six thousand in summer, and everything moves by ferry from Saltholmen or Stenpiren on an ordinary city ticket. Land transport is mostly the flakmoped, a three-wheeled flatbed moped; on Köpstadsö even mopeds are banned and people use wheelbarrows.

A square kilometre of tanker owners

Donsö is under a square kilometre and had 1,407 residents in 2010, and it is the home port of an unusual concentration of shipping companies — Donsötank, Furetank, Veritas Tankers, Sirius, Tärntank. A car-free island of fourteen hundred people owns a meaningful share of the northern European product-tanker fleet.

The gate you sail under

Älvsborgsbron carries six lanes over the mouth of the Göta älv, designed by Sven Olof Asplund and inaugurated on 8 November 1966 by the communications minister Olof Palme. Its 417-metre span was the longest in Sweden when it opened, and the clearance is forty-five metres held over a hundred metres of navigable width, marked by floodlit patches painted on the bridge itself. Forty-five metres is well short of what the largest cruise ships need, so many of them berth outside it.

Back to top

XI

South Through the Kattegat

The cat's gate

Hanseatic pilots named it for a gap so tight a cat would struggle through. It averages twenty-two metres deep and most of it is shallower than that.

Average depth: 22 m
Most of it: Under 25 m
Upper layer: 18–26 ‰ salt
Lower layer: 32–34 ‰ salt
Halocline: About 15 m down
Tidal range: 15–30 cm

Two seas stacked on each other

The Kattegat is stratified into two bodies of water with a halocline about fifteen metres down. The surface layer at eighteen to twenty-six parts per thousand is mostly Baltic outflow, freshest in the north and against the Swedish coast. Below it lies North Sea and Skagerrak water at thirty-two to thirty-four. The two opposing flows move a net 475 cubic kilometres of water out of the Baltic every year. The tide shifts the level only fifteen to thirty centimetres — it is wind, not tide, that mixes this sea, and in a strong blow the layers mix completely.

Cat's gate

The name is Dutch — katte gat — from late medieval Hanseatic pilotage, which likened the passage to a gap so narrow even a cat would have trouble, on account of the reefs and the shoals. Channels have since been dredged, reefs cleared of boulders and a dense network of lights installed. About seven thousand ships a year still come through, most of them deep-draught and bound to or from the Baltic.

Still going south

Göteborg was not the finish. From here the track runs down the Swedish side of the Kattegat, through the Öresund past København, and on into the Baltic to Breege on Rügen — 482 nautical miles from Stavanger in five legs. Two nights and a day of this chapter are one long shallow run with Denmark to starboard and Sweden to port, and nothing to look at but the traffic.

Back to top

XII

The Sound

Helsingør · 4 km across

Four kilometres wide at the top, seven and a half metres deep at the bottom, and the only short way out of the Baltic. Everything about it follows from that.

Narrowest: 4 km, Helsingør–Helsingborg
Maximum draught: 7.7 m
Shipping: 35,000–40,000 a year
Sound Dues: 1429–1857
Ships tolled: About 1.8 million
Kronborg: Built 1574–1585

The shallow road

The Sound is about a hundred and twenty nautical miles shorter than the Great Belt and it is also the shallow one — passable by ships drawing no more than 7.7 metres at mean sea level. Deep-draught traffic therefore goes round by the Belt. The two straits divide the world's Baltic shipping between them by hull depth rather than by destination, and between thirty-five and forty thousand ships a year take this one.

The castle as a toll gate

Eric of Pomerania built a fortress here in the 1420s because a cannon could reach across, and from 1429 every foreign ship paid to pass — at first a single English gold noble. Frederik II replaced it between 1574 and 1585 with the Renaissance castle standing today, and had the red brick faced in white sandstone halfway through the work. Shakespeare set Hamlet here and the world knows it as Elsinore.

The king's money, not the kingdom's

About 1.8 million ships paid at Helsingør over four centuries. The often-repeated claim that the dues were two thirds of Danish state revenue does not survive the Danish archives: the national record office puts it at as much as a quarter in some periods, and about a tenth by the end. The reason the myth persists is more interesting than the myth — until 1771 the money went into the monarch's private chest rather than the treasury, which is exactly what made Danish kings so independent of their own nobility.

Twenty turbines on a shoal

The curved line of machines off the city is Middelgrunden, twenty Bonus two-megawatt turbines on a natural reef in four to eight metres of water, three and a half kilometres out. Ten belong to the municipal utility and ten to a cooperative that had 8,552 members at its founding — the first community-owned offshore wind farm in the world. The curve is not a flourish: the original plan was twenty-seven turbines in three rows, and the single arc was the outcome of an objection at the public hearing.

Back to top

XIII

København

55°41′N · the merchants' harbour

A city that exists because of this strait, taking a day off from the passage that goes through it.

Population: 667,099
First named: 1186, as Hafn
Name means: Merchants' harbour
Capital from: 1417
Nyhavn dug: 1670–1675
Ashore: About eleven hours

The harbour is the reason

The oldest recorded name of the place is Hafn, in a papal letter of 1186; by 1253 it is Køpmannæhafn, the merchants' harbour, which is what København still means. It grew from an eleventh-century trading place beside the Øresund herring fishery, on the strait through which everything entering or leaving the Baltic had to pass. The Latin form, Hafnia, gave its name to the element hafnium.

Nyhavn was not picturesque

The canal was cut between 1670 and 1675 on the order of Christian V, dug by Danish soldiers and by Swedish prisoners taken in the war of 1658–60. It was a working cut that brought ships from the sea straight into the city at Kongens Nytorv, and for most of its life it was known for beer, sailors and prostitution. It was emptied of ships, used as a car park, made a museum harbour in 1977 and pedestrianised in 1980. Hans Christian Andersen lived at three separate addresses on it.

A century and a quarter as a ruin

Frederik V laid the foundation stone of the marble church on 31 October 1749, sealing gold and silver medals into it. Eigtved died, funding tightened, and in 1770 Struensee ordered the work stopped; what was standing was left open for over a century while schemes came and went — a concert hall, a museum, and at one point a gasholder. The banker C.F. Tietgen bought the ruin in the 1870s and paid for its completion; the marble was dropped for limestone on cost, and it was consecrated on 19 August 1894. The dome as built spans 31 metres on twelve piers.

The four houses and the statue between them

Amalienborg was not built as a palace. Frederik V laid out Frederiksstaden in 1749 and its centrepiece was four mansions for four noble families, identical outside, around an octagonal square. Christiansborg burned in February 1794 and left the royal family homeless; they bought two of the four within days and moved in that December. Saly's equestrian statue in the middle cost 500,000 rigsdaler, about five times what one of the palaces cost, and was paid for by the Asiatic Company — which rather undercuts the inscription's claim that it was a gift in memory of the people's love.

Back to top

XIV

Breege

54°37′N · Wittow, Rügen

Out of the Sound overnight and into water with no tide in it, two and a half metres deep, reed to the edge. Five hundred and eighty-seven people, and a row of captains' houses.

Population: 587
First recorded: 1313
Maximum draught: 2.5 m
Water-level change: 0.3 m, wind-driven
Baltic salinity: 7–8 psu
Baltic average depth: 52 m

What a Bodden is

A Bodden is a shallow bay made where gently rolling ground moraine was flooded after the last ice age, shut off from the open sea by spits and islands. The name is thought to be Low German for the ground or the bottom, which is a fair description: the Breeger Bodden is the western end of a system about fourteen kilometres long, at most seven metres deep, brackish at less than one per cent salt, with reed round almost the whole shore.

Instead of tide, wind

The ocean tide is barely felt in the Baltic. It cannot borrow the ocean's, because its only connection is through the narrow shallow Danish straits — if the Kattegat rose by a metre it would take about ten days for enough water to flow in for the Baltic to follow, against a twelve-hour tidal period. Levels here move with the strength and direction of the wind instead, which is why the shallowest flats are called Windwatten, wind flats, and not tidal flats.

Why a village of 587 has captains' houses

From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century Breege was a trading port that shipped agricultural produce directly to England, and the reed-thatched houses at the western end of the village were built by the merchant skippers who ran that trade. It was reckoned at times the richest village on Rügen. When sail lost the trade around the middle of the nineteenth century the place turned to fishing, and then to sea-bathing; the houses are listed now, and let to visitors.

Staying inside the buoys

The way in is not difficult so long as you do not leave the channel — outside it anglers stand in waders beside the buoy line. The buoyage is unlit and not recommended after dark, large stones lie close to the fairway on the starboard hand from one buoy pair on, and the small green buoys near the harbour look exactly like the anchor buoys of the fishing boats lying all over the Bodden. They are not. They are channel marks, and you leave them to starboard coming in.