Lady Hamilton 2019

VANO TO UTO (both islands in the Finnish Archipelago) – 30 miles

Day 63  Friday, 2^nd August, 2019

Vano has a shop and a café and 2 very smelly earth closets.  It’s a rocky island so no earth – just a long metal slide with a log-jam at the top!  Say no more …  and I have to scale the rocks to put the rubbish in a bin on the wooden pier.

Leave about 9 am and are sailing – real sailing without the engine – by 10.30 am.  We put out the main and the genoa, the wind is from NNW and only about 7 – 9 knots (which increases after lunch to 16 knots) and we get 4.5 – 5.5 knots out of our very heavy boat. 

We’re trying to beat the Finns – but they have much lighter boats and not weighed down with Fray Bentos pies and all our accoutrements for live-aboards!

All the buoys, cardinals, lighthouses, restrictive and information signs must cost the 5 million Finns dear.  They have to pay onerous taxes.  This is what it says in ‘Bob in the Baltic’ by Gryff Rees Jones.  I’ve been re-reading this book and referring to it many times.  And they did hit a rock, on the wrong side of red buoy on the Green Route sailing from Helsinki to Hanko! 

We’re sailing on a yacht super highway – 9m deep on this course (the Green Route was between 2 and 4 m) and we see more than 90 m depth on our instruments.  Twice as deep as the North Sea!  We’ve seen no big ships at all – just yachts and speedboats – and we’re sailing through the Archipelago National Park.

Arrive at Uto at 2pm and put out our stern anchor, which Malcolm has already prepared.  A lady from the Finnish yacht next to us caught my bow lines.  We’ve been following their Halberg Rassey  from Vano!  More yachts and motor boats arrived after us so we were fortunate to find a place. 

The man in the shop said I could pay in the Café, Hannas horizont, up the steps.  This time I paid by card – 15 euros for the boat with electricity.  They have toilets like the last island.

The lighthouse is closed until Sunday as the boss, who does the Guided Tours, has gone away.  It was the first Finnish lighthouse, built in Uto in 1753.  It has a chapel on the 3^rd floor, used since the 1840’s. 

The basket used to hang high in the original tower and was used to contain a fire for guiding the sailing vessels.

The stone building of the lighthouse keepers, Strehuset, from 1753, is now a museum.  Unfortunately the captions are all in Swedish and Finnish – but there was a film with English subtitles about schoolchildren from Uto going to secondary school in Turku in the ‘50s.  Fortunately they came over to Uto for the holidays.  They had to cross the ice in Winter, skiing 8 kms to another island and then by car to hail a passing ship.  Then they had to climb a ladder from the ice to the ship.  The large ships must have kept the fairway open.  In Summer they got on a pilot boat (Uto has two pilot boats) and had to negotiate a very wobbly rope ladder hung over the side of the ship. 

There were pictures of grey seals in the museum – they used to shoot them for their skins and meat.  No wonder we haven’t seen any seals this year! 

We go for a walk up the track to a hotel and find a maypole again.  Each village has at least one, decorated in a public gathering the day before Midsummer.  Once raised the maypole then stands until the following Midsummer.  Up to 25m tall, the whitewashed spruce poles are a cross between  a mast and a totem pole.  Motifs include sailing boats (which we saw at Hanko), ears of corn representing the harvest, a wreath symbolising love, a sun facing east and other icons of community togetherness. 

Can you spot us in the harbour?

Uto was a military base protecting St. Petersburg during the Soviet period of WW11.  It covered the area southwards to the large Estonian island of Hiiumaa.   Now it has two military areas (on the east and west side of the island) for the Finns – and you’re forbidden to enter them!