Our season ended without further excitement. Mary proved to be excellent crew, and the weather presented an opportunity for her to try out just about every condition. We even had a barbecue night on anchor and a swim.
Melodrama was put to bed in the big shed in Augustenborg and in the weeks following had repairs made to the gunwale under the German ‘attack’ boat’s insurance. So all is well and we can look forward to winter and another season in 2024.
But Storm Babet has been wreaking havoc across Scandinavia, Britain and Ireland, and we have heard that many of our favourite harbours have suffered major damage. Klintholm, Rødvig, Sonderborg, Gedser, on the list goes. All round the coast, harbours have been completely submerged and battered by the wind.
In a low lying region where there is very little tidal effect, the unusual Easterly storms have pushed the Baltic’s water to the West, where when it met Denmark, it had nowhere to go but up. There have been storm surges of up to 2.4m, completely flooding many harbours and destroying not only the boats still afloat, but in the case of Hesnæs, much of the old harbour wall has crumbled into the sea.
A few posts back I showed a graph from the Danish Met Office for Hesnæs, during the Westerly storm when we sheltered there. The scale of that graph (up to 40cm) is nothing compared to this one, mirrored in all the harbours across the country.
The water level meter which is in a shed on the inner harbor wall, stopped measuring at 200cm, the remaining graph is an estimate only.
In Augustenborg, the water level rose to just about level with the posts securing boats to the pontoons, and Anders and his team worked hard to make sure that the boats stayed put and didn’t float off onto each other.
I don’t have rights to publish photos from the Danish news, but here are a few links:
Link to TheLocal.dk news article
We are grateful to be safe and hope that the Danish harbours and businesses are supported to repair the damage and not impact their livelihood too much next year.
Dear William and Karen, all too exciting, I guess; Sullivan told us about the two days of storm, from a land perspective, so I was interested to hear your narrative of events which must inevitably have been much more acute. Glad to know you and craft are OK and that you’ve been able to help others also.
As a by-the-way, do you have contact details for Martin and Georgina Duncan? Neither of the phone numbers that I have for them, ie both England and Omagh addresses, is recognised or is ringing out, and I have never previously had an email address for either of them. I have written them a card but do not know where to post it to ! I may well call at Lee’s house on Hospital Road, which they have inherited and have said would be living in permanently, since both are now recently retired, I understand. I’d enquire next door, in normal circumstances, but understand from her brother, Sam King, that Eileen Charleton has lost her marbles recently! Gifts of old age, as a friend has remarked in similar circumstances.
thank goodness you got back to the safety of the aircon shed before that lot blew westwards – sorry for the Danes but Vikings are a hardy lot and will recover and sail again, as they have through the centuries. How about St Andrews – you were close enough to all that torrential rain that drowned Angus … I well remember howling weather hitting straight from the Urals in the 1960’s!