Kobba Klintar & Mariehamn, Åland Islands
“The wind, it is always the wind.” So said our pilot when queried about risks to navigation. “Not the skerries?” we respond, “Those scary rounded rocky forms that appear and disappear in the early dawn looking like hedgehogs rolled up tight with quills upright?” Equipment is sophisticated in this day and age and one would expect each rock to be charted, satellite imaged and a prominent blip on the radar so it seemed his answer was correct. However, here the islands grow. From only two known ones ten thousand years ago, they slowly rose above the sea, rafted on the earth’s readjusting mantle. Now more than six thousand march their way across the Gulf of Bothnia like giant’s stepping-stones. But it is the wind that can whip a vessel from its course to meet an unfortunate end and it is the wind that has made these islands famous.
Windrows skipped across the waves parallel to our path and drew the clouds into furrowed patterns. Eagles stretched their broad wings forth and rose from a rocky roost to ride upon the updrafts. At the edge of the archipelago, the pilot station of Kobba Klintar stands, a monument to the past when sailing vessels plied the seas and headed home to Mariehamn. Bulldozed by massive moving ice, its rounded countenance was scarred by glacial grooves and striations that served as a nidus for vegetative growth and tiny reflective pools. Lichens painted pink granite with patterns like crazy quilts. Frozen in time an artist stands, brush and palette at the ready to sketch the scene or capture shapes and forms of whatever should pass his way. Beside a monstrous foghorn nestled beneath the apex of the pilot station’s roof another bronze form forever holds his spyglass to his eye waiting for the ghostly call from vessels of the past. Art now seems to dominate the restored historic site that welcomed us this morning.
Hidden within the island, the town of Mariehamn bustled today just as it did in the past. Now motorized vessels of massive size come and go with regularity, ferries bound for Tallinn, Helsinki or other ports. Slightly more than one hundred years ago, four-masted sailing vessels joyfully returned from races round the “Horns” as wheat was moved from the southern seas to Europe’s hungry shores. Families waited to greet them home and come fall to see them off, until today only one remains moored in a prominent spot. The graceful Pommern, a Flying-P line vessel, is a living monument to times gone by and a reminder of the glories of sail. We roamed its decks and prowled its bowels trying to imagine the sound of the wind rippling its sails and the water rushing past its hull. Part of the newly reopened Maritime Museum, it tells the tale of a town where ships and shipping were a way of life.
