SWEDEN: Cruising from palace to palace (part 2)

With dinner and schnapps out of the way, we turned around from our resting place near Drottningholm palace for the journey back to Riddarholmen. Even with so much water to space out the harbour’s users, there were just too many idiot power boat skippers who liked flaunting their speed and would cut across our bows so that we had to deal with their wake knocking us around.

Kenneth’s solution to such minor crises was to reach into his refreshment trolley and bring out a magnum of champagne.

I have a recurring dream/nightmare where Sydney’s harbour is lined by a single undulating apartment block, a hundred storey high ribbon of steel and concrete ensuring that every single person in the city had a harbour view. For some stretches of our journey this was brought to mind as banks of lower rise apartment blocks jostled for a view at every shore. For the most part though I just enjoyed the thuckity-thuckity-thuckity beat of the motor as the skyline of Gamla Stan came closer. For the last kilometre I stood on the foredeck, back to the mast, taking in the last row of apartments and cafes along the Riddarfjärden.

Jörgen dropped us off exactly where he collected us from about 4 hours earlier and we waved a quick goodbye as he had another engagement for the evening. Munson needed no help disembarking, thus to prance and woo-oo on solid ground.