Ramsholm to Hapsal Through the Nukke Channel

I had left the lead overboard as a means of telling whether our anchor held, and three or four times in the night I went on deck to have a look at the lead-line. Once, when the wind had shifted and we had swung a quarter of a circle, the line stretching far out on our beam gave me a bit of a fright, but I went forward and found I could easily hold the boat by one hand on the chain. I took in the lead and dropped it again, and satisfied myself that we were not moving, and finally turned in so thoroughly reassured that I slept until six and was very unwilling to get up even then. However, the wind began to make a rowdy hullabaloo overhead, and at half-past six I turned out sleepily to find that it was blowing hard from the S.E. dead against us.

I had been told that the channel was impossible for a sailing vessel against the wind and that the local sailors never attempt it, but wait at the entrance till the wind will take them through, this being the reason why yesterday we had met such a number of sail all together. Still, we had made our present anchorage against this same wind, and I decided to try to get through, making up my mind beforehand that there should be no false squeamishness about dropping back in case we should find ourselves engaged on a hopeless bit of work.

One can always find a good enough reason for doing anything that one has made up one’s mind to do. In this case I had a perfect one, quite apart from the fact that we did not like staying where we were, and that the jam had been so good that we had eaten all the bread and could get no more till we should come to Hapsal. There was a reason pro and a reason contra⁠—everything, in fact, that the human mind requires when it is putting up a pretence of being logical. The wind looked like continuing, but, so far as I could see through the long-distance glasses, there was not yet much current about the spar-buoys, which, however, were standing very high out of the water, tatters of seaweed clinging to them far above the waterline showing their more normal depth. I was sure of two things: the first, that a strong current would be setting against us out of the Sound within a very few hours, and the second, that I should have to deal with depths abnormally low. The first outweighed the second, and at seven in the morning our anchor was up and hanging at our bows, ready to drop at any moment in case of need, and we were off warily back to the fairway, the lead going all the time in two fathoms of water. Then we beat up towards the two spar-buoys that mark the entrance to the passage.

The men on a cutter whirling out of the channel with the wind behind them looked at us as if they thought we were mad and shrugged their shoulders with expression. But, though Racundra is not good at beating as compared with racing yachts, she is better against the wind than any of the local cutters and schooners, and, when we set her at it this morning, she seemed to know she was expected to do her best, and did it. There was a toughish wind, too, and that always suits her. With less wind we should not have tried it. At the same time, we left nothing to chance and took no risks of her missing stays, which, in this narrow way between rocks and sharply shoaling banks, would have meant almost inevitable disaster. I had sweated over the chart till I knew it pretty well by heart, and indeed only looked at it twice, and that when we were already through the actual channel and were out again in more or less open water, looking for the buoys and beacons that show the way into Hapsal Bay. I therefore set the Ancient at the tiller and went forward myself with the lead-line handy, though as a matter of fact there was never time to use it and it would have been useless, because there is no gradual shoaling. You are either in the channel with three fathoms of water or out of the channel with a fathom or less, or on a rock with no more than a couple of feet. My real business forward was to deal with the staysail in getting her quickly about and to con the little ship in without, if I could help it, communicating to the Ancient any of the doubts with which I was myself beset.

I kept my eyes on the sticks which here serve as spar-buoys, on the colour of the water and on the bottom, often only too visible, and shouted “Ready about” in a tone as near as possible that in which those words are spoken when we are at sea and have the whole Baltic to make mistakes in. At first the Ancient was just a little bit petulant at the frequency of our tacks, but we touched once with the centreboard from hanging on an extra second, once only, and from that moment he was perfect and everything worked in the delirious, exciting manner of tightrope walking. He knew then that we really were on a tightrope, and that this was not an example of my ridiculous preference for imagining, when navigating, that Racundra has the draught of a big ship. We swung round as the words were out of my mouth; I had the staysail aback till the mainsail filled, and we were off again, rushing from side to side of the channel, making a bit every time, creeping up in hurried zigzags, a dozen or so between each buoy. The chart that I had read so often in the winter took visible solid shape as we moved. There was Mereholm; there those rocks awash; there two windmills on Nukke; there, at last, the buoy with a ball and two brooms, bases apart, on the top. The brooms are not there, but that must be the buoy none the less.

It is hard enough to give an idea of how things looked. At first, of course, there was the open sea behind us, and we were pushing our way in between the wooded island of Worms and the low, grass-patched and rocky mainland. The two were always a good distance apart, but outcrops from both of them were close to us either above or under water, and at times it was difficult to preserve one’s faith in chart knowledge and to sail so near those brown rocks with such a space of open water on the other side. How much simpler to sail boldly up the middle. And then, on the other tack, just a few score yards, often less, and there were more rocks under the water, or pale green shallows splashed with dark, and we were thankfully about again and scuttling back towards the brown lumps that at least were out of water and less secretive in their villainy. And yet, what a stretch of water! and round Racundra would go again, the wavelets foaming under her bows, and so on, to and fro, to and fro, each time gaining a little southwards against the wind, through gusts of which I had to yell to be heard by the Ancient at the tiller.

I had enjoyed following the intricate Moon Sound channel from Paternoster through by the Erik Stone and Harry Island to the open sea, but there big ships could go, and we had a margin of yards and sometimes far more, in case we left it for a moment. Here there was no margin at all. We were ourselves drawing with centreboard down (as we had to have it down for beating against the wind) more than most of the small coasters who alone use this channel. It was incredibly exciting, the more so that as we proceeded, and time went on and the wind still blew, there was visibly growing current against us from the S. through the channel. It became a race between us and the current and the wind. Could we get through to the open and round into the bay of Hapsal before the wind had made the current so great that we could not hold against it?2 Each spar-buoy left astern was a separate triumph, and I would hardly let myself believe that we had left the worst of the channel behind us until the view before us had already widened, and we could see far into the broad Sound, where hull-down were three goose-winged schooners hurrying from the S. before the wind that for them was a friendly ally, the same wind that Racundra, sailing from the N., had had to meet and conquer. Now, after just four hours of frenzied beating, we were making longer tacks, keeping our eyes on two tall beacons on the mainland on the southern side of Hapsal Bay, already within the mouth of the inlet, and watching to bring two other beacons in line under Hapsal town with its church and ruined castle. Those two beacons, one on shore and one on a bit of a rock almost awash, would lead us safely between the shallows towards the little Hapsal harbour, on the quay of which again are two other beacons, which, taken in line, help little ships through the last few hundred yards of their passage. We shifted from the line of the first pair to the line of the second, found the spar-buoys that supplement these land signs, and then, sailing E. with the wind free, fairly foamed from buoy to buoy until at noon we rounded up and anchored beside two small trading cutters about a cable’s length from Hapsal pierhead.

Here we lay for two nights, waiting for a fair wind, and used the intervening day of bright sunshine for the drying of bedding and mattresses and for a visit to the town which is some little way from the jetty. Indeed, as you approach Hapsal from the sea, the jetty, with the tall white granary behind it, looks like an island, for the narrow strip of land that connects it with the town is flat and low. The town itself is grouped round a low hillock on which is a ruined castle, which has, so we learnt, its ghosts and its Hounds of Hell guarding hidden treasure, all indeed that is necessary and fitting for a ruin in a popular watering-place.

The castle was the residence of the German bishops who, during the thirteenth century, made themselves the first foreign rulers of Estonia. The revolting Ests tried in vain to take it in 1334. Two hundred years and more after that it was taken by the Swedes. They did not hold it for long, for the Swedish officer commanding had no money to pay his troops, and so, in those good old days of private initiative, pawned the castle to his soldiers on the understanding that, if their pay did not arrive by the next Midsummer’s Day, they could sell the castle to whom they chose, on condition that the buyer should be a Christian, but should not be either the Russian Tsar or Bishop Magnus, who had married a niece of Ivan the Terrible. The soldiers did not get their pay and did actually sell the castle for forty thousand talers to Ungern, who was acting viceroy for the King of Denmark. Next year the Russians took it for nothing and without meeting any resistance, for which reason the Danish leader, Stark, was duly executed in Arensburg. Ten years later the Russians, after a fight, lost it to the Swedes, and in 1628 the Swedish King, improving on the commercial methods of the Swedish soldiers, sold it for 66,830 talers to a Field-Marshal, whose son died in the utmost poverty after his father’s purchase had been quietly re-appropriated by the Crown, who perhaps were thinking of selling it again. But the Swedes held on to the property too long, for before they tried to sell it a third time, Peter the Great in 1710 made it Russian, and Russian it remained until 1918, when it was occupied by the Germans, on whose departure the Ests came at last into their own.

We had this ruin to see and, besides that, needed bread, milk, meat and matches, and had set our hearts on a cabbage, which we had not been able to find in Baltic Port. So after bathing in the early morning, we walked in over the low slip of land, that would certainly be covered at high water if this were not a tideless sea, and came to the town⁠—a little town with winding streets of stone and wooden houses, twisting about round the shallow inlets of water, and from one promontory to another in a manner most confusing to a stranger. We had some difficulty in finding the shops, which were, as everyone told us, in the middle of the town. The Estonians are an admirable, tenacious people, but in all the years of my acquaintance with them I have never met one who knew how to tell me the way. They will point vaguely in the wrong direction, or, if they point in the right direction, will tell you, as a landmark, to look out for a tree with a broken branch among several hundreds all with broken branches, instead of mentioning a large, obvious barn which a blind man could not miss. Here, in Hapsal, we found the further difficulty that the cosmopolitan season was over and that therefore everybody had ceased to understand any language but Estonian. I was there once for a few days earlier in the summer, when most people seemed to know both Russian and German. Now it was as if every linguist in the place had gone into hibernation till next spring. We did, however, at last come out in the middle of the town, where we found two hotels. We tried both. In one a man was viciously tuning a piano. In the other there was a gramophone. In neither did we see any visitors besides ourselves, and in both we were told at once that the season was over. Indeed we were told so by everyone with whom we spoke, even by the baker from whom we bought the bread, as much as to say that we had no business to be there. I got the impression that the town was quite consciously recovering itself, drawing a long breath and enjoying its nationality after the alien but profitable bustle of the summer.

In summer Hapsal is crowded with visitors, who, for the most part, do not live in the hotels, but rent the little houses, or parts of them, at so much “for the season.” It is not as in England, where whole families go to the seaside for a tumultuous fortnight or month of holiday. Here, the men plant out their wives and children at Hapsal for the summer, to get brown, take mud baths and cure imaginary diseases, while they run down from Reval by train for the week ends. There is a floating restaurant on the inland lake, and great consumption of vanilla ices, besides open-air concerts, regattas in hired boats⁠—in fact, opportunities for all that such visitors demand.

When Racundra sailed in there, all this maelstrom of amusement was still. The idle crowds of hypochondriac rheumatics taking the baths and impatiently exchanging symptoms had disappeared. The little town was itself again, and, if I were to stay there, the back end of the year is certainly the time that I should choose. The tiny market under the castle was quietly busy in the morning, as no doubt it has been since the Middle Ages. We met there women from the country and the islands in their local costume⁠—bright red bodices, black accordion-pleated skirts, with red stockings, short white socks over the red stockings and black shoes with strips of black leather crisscross over the white socks. And though the visitors were gone the boats remained, and, for the crew of Racundra, these boats compete with the ruins as the things of most interest in Hapsal.

I should explain that beyond the pier and the town and those flat promontories is a huge stretch of shallow water, on which the men of Hapsal take their summer visitors sailing. This inland sea is nowhere more than a very few feet deep, and a special type of boat, unlike any others on the Estonian coast, has been evolved for sailing on it. I have a reproduction of an old drawing showing that boats something like these were in existence in the very early nineteenth century, if not earlier. They are shaped a little like the shallow wherries of the Norfolk Broads, but are, of course, much smaller. They have a fair-sized cabin right forward, with a big well for the passengers and a small well right aft for the steersman, who from that position controls the sails. The mainsail is extremely high and they are sloop-rigged. They have neither centreboards nor lee-boards, but, drawing not more than a couple of feet of water, they sail in the most remarkable manner both off and by the wind.