The southwest coast of Sweden is beautiful, with white sand beaches in the far south of Skane giving way to forested hills of Halland. But the jewel of the west coast, and one of the reasons people sail from far away to visit, are the islands outside of the Gothenburg and along the Bohuslan coast all the way to the border with Norway.
The coastline between Gothenburg and the Norwegian border is only a bit more than 100nm long, but that relatively short distance is packed with nearly 10,000 islands. Some are large, like the boatbuilding island of Orust and it’s neighbor Tjorn, and many are small, grouped into innumerable skerries.
With only the north tip of Denmark and the southern edge of Norway providing any shelter from the weather blowing in off the North Sea, the landscape is windswept. But what might be desolate in some places is rendered beautiful here by the long, low evening light of the Scandinavian summer reflecting off the wave-smoothed rocks of the archipelago.
Madrone’s first introduction to the archipelago of the west coast (or “Best Coast”, as some locals call it) is a small gap between the islands of Klatten and Halleskar. Local boats tend to drop a stern anchor and then drive the bow of their boats right up to the rocks before nonchalantly stepping off to drive a stake into a crack in the rock to hold their bow line. We’ve spent our entire sailing lives trying to stay away from the rocks, so we dropped anchor in the middle of the small channel, feeling extremely fortunate to be at the start of such a beautiful coastline.
