We woke up to a beautiful morning – sunny and a very light breeze, so decided to head off straight away from Hano, leaving at around 7.30am. We knew that the route would take us just through a 15 mile offshore exclusion zone which runs from just north of Simrishamn up to Ahus. This meant that we would have to head a little further east than we had planned to ensure we didn’t creep into the firing zone. We did try to look up whether they were firing or not, but Google Translate seemed to struggle with it, so we didn’t come to any firm conclusions.
We had to motor the first couple of hours, but then the breeze started to come up and once there was consistent 7-8 knots we hoisted that sails and headed hard on the wind. Gradually to our surprise, the wind increased slightly, but also shifted to the SE allowing us to ease off and still miss the firing range corner point. In fact we were almost on a reach by the time we got to Simrishamn.
For entertainment during the trip, the Swedish Navy very kindly laid on some war games around us. At one time we counted around 12 naval vessels heading in various what appeared to be random directions. it is tempting to think that this is their strategy to confuse the enemy – it certainly worked on us. One patrol boat even altered course to miss us, went round our stern and then shadowed us on our quarter matching our speed. When he started waving to us from the bridge, I radioed them to see if they wanted anything, but they just radioed back that they were saying hello – now that is my kind of war – a nice friendly one.
To see our track, follow the link below: