CHAPTER XI
BALTIC CRUISING
By E. F. Knight
A few English sailing yachts visit the Baltic every year, but that wind-swept sea can scarcely be termed one of the favourite cruising grounds of our pleasure fleet. This is not altogether strange; for the voyage is a long and rough one round the Skaw into the squally Cattegat; chilly gales and choppy seas in many summers form the rule rather than the exception among the Danish Islands, and the principal seaports of the inland sea are singularly dull and uninteresting.
Nevertheless—and the reader will soon understand that what I am about to say is in no wise inconsistent with my opening sentence—I am confident that the yachtsman who undertakes a summer's cruise on the Baltic in a small vessel will afterwards remember it as one of his very pleasantest experiences. This is a sea which is often coldly repelling to the cursory traveller, but it is strangely fascinating to him who takes the trouble to explore it, and the charm of it increases with further knowledge.
How interesting, to begin with, is the voyage out! For, with the small vessel I am speaking of, the yachtsman does not double the stormy Skaw, but sails in and out along all the winding coasts that were the cradle of our race, the lands of the Frisians, Saxons, Jutes, Angles, and Danes. Having waited for a slant in one of our Eastern ports—Harwich, for example—he crosses the North Sea to a Dutch harbour, follows the shores of the Zuider Zee, picks his way up the narrow channels that divide the sandy Frisian Islands from the mainland, enters the river Eider, and passes up the ship canal to Kiel.
And that port once reached, what possibilities of glorious cruising are before him! He has now left behind the discoloured waves of the North Sea, and his keel is cleaving water so limpid that every stone and weed is visible fathoms beneath. He can sail up narrow sounds between park-like glades and forests of pines and magnificent oaks and beeches; or up long winding fiords which take him beyond the coast belt of forest and pasture, and past the undulating corn lands, into the very heart of the Cimbrian peninsula, where the desolate moorlands of the Ahl, grand in their northern savagery, spread far on either side of the sinuous creek. There is the long Slie, a succession of lakes and narrows that leads to old Schleswig; there are the deep inlets of Flensborg, Apenrade, Veile, and many-islanded Liim; Ise Fiord, perhaps the fairest of all, with its promontories of noble forest; the lovely sounds of Svendborg and the Little Belt; and a score of other straits and lochs that make this in many respects the finest cruising ground in Europe. I do not know where else, when the sun shines out between the rain squalls, the sea appears so blue, the grass and the foliage seem so green and luxuriant, as in this land of Denmark. It is pleasant to sail, as one often does, suddenly out of the choppy windy open Baltic into the shelter of these narrows, where the great trees dip their branches into the smooth water, where one comes upon scene after scene of tender and restful beauty, and where the traveller knows, too, that whenever he may choose to land, at some trim village or opposite some snug old farmhouse, he is sure of a welcome from the kindly people. Then, if the yachtsman wishes for more open water, he can sail out of the fiord mouth and steer for one of the many delightful little islands that stud the Baltic. Remote many of them are, set in the middle of that treacherous sea, inhabited by a few primitive fishermen. The advent of a stranger is rare in the extreme. I spent two summers in these waters, and found that no British yacht had ever come before to most of the fiords and islets I explored.
For it happens that nearly all the charms I speak of are lost to him who sails these waters in a big vessel. It is a coasting voyage in a small craft I am advocating here. Of the fiords that penetrate the Cimbrian peninsula and the larger islands, only a few are available for a yacht of deep draught, and in order to visit some of the most beautiful of the inland waters one's vessel should not draw more than two feet. Again, though harbours that will admit coasters of even light tonnage are far apart on much of the iron-bound coast of the Baltic, there are to be found everywhere, at short intervals, little artificial havens that have been built for the accommodation of the craft of the herring fishermen; while the only shelter afforded by many of the islets consists of similar havens, frequented solely by the fishing and ferry boats. At the entrance of most of these miniature harbours there is a depth of about four feet of water at high tide.
Now bad weather springs up frequently and with wonderful suddenness in the Baltic, and a dangerous sea soon rises on those shallow waters. It is therefore of great advantage to have a boat of so light a draught as to be able to run for refuge into any of these little havens. Such a craft has nearly always a snug port not far under her lee while coasting here; whereas a larger craft can find no harbour for many leagues, and has to make the best she can of it on the open sea. The shallow boat is the safest for such a cruise, besides being the only one with which the most interesting inlets and islets can be visited. She must be small, but at the same time she must be as good a sea-boat as is possible for her size; for she is not likely to escape bad weather altogether on the Baltic.
