The day gets off to an exciting start: our neighbour on the pontoon is wrestling with the forestay on her Scampi, more precisely with the jib halyard, which refuses to move in either direction. During yesterday’s strong winds, it seems to have gone with a rather decisive “clang”. We suspect that the block at the masthead has broken, or that the halyard has become jammed somewhere up there — which means only one thing: up the mast. With the assistance of a sturdy Norwegian from the neighbouring boat and our trusty bosun’s chair, we manage to winch her aloft (see below) and eventually clear the halyard. As it turns out, the problem was actually further down inside the mast — but, hey, nothing beats a little early-morning exercise at a lofty altitude. Afterwards, we enjoy our first proper Swedish kanelbullar for second breakfast, before setting off for a spot of archipelago slalom. Bohuslän, Sweden’s Skagerrak coast, is showing itself at its very finest. It is simply beautiful here!

Above: Plenty of traffic in the Hamburgsund. Below: We spend the evening in Hunnebostrand, a harbour steeped in seven centuries of history, where fresh fish is still landed today. There, with the aid of our sextant, we manage to catch a perfect view of today’s solar eclipse: here in Sweden, it reaches eighty per cent “solförmörkelse”.