With a sunny start to the day, we headed off first thing and after a short motor down the narrow channel south of Gullholmen, we started sailing fairly quickly and we kept sailing, and sailing and sailing …. In fact the sails came down less than a mile short of Åstol, so an excellent sail.
The only time that the engine went on was for about two minutes as we headed through the very narrow part of Kyrkesund. In fact we might even have made that if we hadn’t met a tall ship heading in the opposite direction. She was called the Gratitude and she has been run by the Svenska Kryssarklubbens Seglarskola (the Swedish Cruising Club Sail Training Foundation) since 1957. She started life in 1903 in Porthleven in Cornwall and operated for many years as a fishing trawler crewed by five men and a boy. On the 30th September 1911 she was involved in a terrible storm and was close to sinking. Three of the five crew members were washed overboard and this mean that only the cabin boy and the third mate survived. The rescue by the Ramsgate fishing smack the Albert was described “A piece of outstanding seamanship”. They managed to tow her back to Lowestoft. However, in 1932 she was sold to Sweden where she fished from the Swedish port of Grundsund – a few miles north of Gullholmen where we started the morning. She was sold on and converted for sailing school use in 1957.
From Kyrkesund we carried on past Skärhamn, weaving through the rocks to the south and west of Tjörn and on to Åstol. We had chosen Åstol as it looked a little more sheltered than Marstrand with a bit of a blow forecast through the night, but it is also a fascinating place. The island is essentially a small rock (just 0.15 square kilometers in area) with around 200 permanent residents. The vast majority of the island is covered in houses with small areas that you can walk around. Its peak population was around 540 residents in 1960, but it has slowly declined since then.
It started its time as a hub supporting the fishing industry. It had a workshop for making fish nets and an ice plant that supplied ice to both Åstol’s fishing fleets and other nearby fishing communities. There were a number of grocery stores (just one remains now) and a bakery, but by the late 1960s they had run out of space to build new homes.
