Åland Islands, Finland

Today we visited the Åland Islands. This archipelago, consisting of over 6,700 named islands and an uncounted number of skerries and rocks, is, politically, an autonomous region of Finland. The Åland Islanders say they are Swedes who carry Finnish passports, because their language and culture are entirely Swedish. The Åland Islands today carry on a long tradition intimately tied to the sea. Their men have gone to sea for centuries and many sailed on the great windjammers which worked in the grain trade with Australia and the nitrate trade with Chile.

We were very fortunate to have Captain Henrik Karlsson sailing with us from Tallin to Mariehamn, the capital of the Åland Islands. I have had the pleasure of sailing under the command of Captain Karlsson aboard S/V Sea Cloud II across the Atlantic and he is a wonderful shipmate and friend. He comes from a long line of Åland Island sea captains and on our first landing in the islands he took us to Kobbaklintar, a small rock which is the site of the old pilot station on the west coast. Here we were able to visit the old buildings which housed the pilots from 1862 until 1972. The main building houses a huge and very effective foghorn powered by an antique compressor and diesel engine which still operate.

After leaving Kobbaklintar we sailed over to Mariehamn for the afternoon. After lunch we paid a visit to S/V Pommern, one of the square-masted vessels operated by Gustav Erikson, owner of the Flying-P line, whose ships included the famous Peking, as well as Pommern. Pommern is now a museum vessel and is lying alongside the Mariehamn Maritime Museum. She is in remarkably fine shape considering that she was built in Scotland in 108 years ago.

We were welcomed on board and given tours which gave us a glimpse of what life aboard this huge cargo ship must have been like. She is a four-masted barque and has a full set of sails, so her owners at the museum say she could put to sea again with only a couple of weeks preparation. We were able to walk around in the cavernous cargo hold where Pommern carried 4,000 tons of grain from Australia to the United Kingdom during the last century.

Mariehamn benefits greatly from her location between Sweden and Finland in that she is a duty-free port for the four large ferries per day plying between Stockholm and Helsinki and they must all call at Mariehamn in order to be able to sell their duty-free goods. This fairway is kept open even in winter when this part of the Baltic completely freezes over and one can drive a car from the Åland Islands to Finland, as the ferries a designed to break ice along this important sailing route.

All in all, it was a wonderful experience in one of the most traditional maritime ports in the world.