Wednesday 10 July
We had a very relaxed morning allowing the rain to wash over the decks and counted the gap between the lightening and thunder – Alex reckoned it was about 3 miles away. David and Sam took the opportunity to set our AIS MOB distress alarms for our life jackets. Somehow David set one off and spent the next half hour talking to every coast guard in the area trying to cancel the alarm!
After a while we got peckish and the rain seemed to ease off enough for us to make a foray onshore where we found a lovely restaurant with an outside area covered from the rain enjoying a lovely view of the harbour.
Alex and I wisely chose the herring and David and Sam had the fish soup. It was all delicious and we washed it down with a bottle of Sauvignon, because I asked for a glass and instead we got a bottle. Sometimes it’s good when things get lost in translation!
After lunch the sun came out so we went to explore the castle. It is absolutely enormous and was built by the Swedes after they gained this area at the peace treaty of Roskilde in 1658. They continued making it bigger and stronger until the 1860s.
It’s obviously a great look out spot for defence but its main role seems to have been as a pretty ghastly prison, and doing ‘Marstrand time’ was synonymous with misery. Some prisoners had committed a crime or annoyed an official, but others were there as ‘confessional’ prisoners when the authorities thought a good stretch of hard labour would help them confess to whatever crimes they may be suspected of.
Most of them came to very grim ends but one cross-dresser called Lasse Maja, whose modus operandi was to dress as a woman and ‘with his female charm seduced rich men out of their money’, managed to escape using the same trick. He was sadly re-caught but got out of hard labour by showing he could cook, and even managed to get a pardon from the king himself!
The castle and the island were taken occasionally by the Danes, the most embarrassing capitulation was when the Danes told the Swedes they had 20,000 other men coming any minute and the Swedes surrendered the castle without a shot fired, needless to say the Danes didn’t have the extra men!
There are a couple of firsts for this castle. One was the first use of a rotating lighthouse in 1781 and the other was the first use of solitary confinement for inmates.
Afterwards we walked all the way round the island, the boys also had a swim.
There are beautiful views:
And lots of pretty flowers hanging onto the rocks:
We saw graceful terns crying softly on the wing. It only took an hour to go all the way round.
We had our first dinner on the boat – pasta and pesto with Parmesan – a good sailor’s staple.
