Tuesday 17 April
It’s almost as if the weather gods have waited for us finally to reach the Baltic Sea before flicking the switch to ‘Summer’: suddenly the skies are blue, the sun is shining and the temperature is rising, along with the barometer.
We slipped out of Dűsternbrook with a lot less drama than we arrived, and enjoyed a lovely sail North up the Förde. This is a little like the Solent: a main shipping channel, and shores lined with nautical industry and fringed with woodland behind beautiful sandy beaches.
TRIVIA CORNER
Kiel Week in June is Germany’s answer to Cowes week, a huge sailing festival of which racing is only a part. Kiel is known as Germany’s Sailing City, as the sailing events for the Olympics of both 1936 and 1972 were competed here.
The 1936 
Olympics, held in Berlin, were nicknamed the Nazi Olympics, and were opened by Adolf Hitler. They were the first to be televised, and apart from an undercurrent of anti-Semitism and the threat of boycott, are probably most ‘famous’ for the until then unprecedented success of black American Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals on the athletics field. Great Britain were tenth in the medals table, winning a total of 14: four Gold, seven Silver and three Bronze. Of these, one Gold and one Bronze were in sailing events, for which we were second only to the host nation.
The 1972 Munich Olympics were overshadowed by the massacre by Black September Palestinian terrorists. In the sailing events, GB came equal second with France, winning one Gold and one Silver.
Trevver was able to maintain his record of diesel consumption, as we motored the 41M to the recommended ‘Ankerplatz’ off Fehmarn Island across a sea mostly resembling liquid glass. To relieve the monotony, there were several sightings of small numbers of harbour porpoise, and an interesting channel to follow around the end of the sandspit into the anchorage, beneath the watchful eye of the red brick lighthouse. A flock of swans was settling for the night in the bay around us.