Last summer I was in Denmark when a forecast for a heavy westerly gale came through on the internet. Over there, it’s generally safe to rely on five days warning for this type of event. People start talking about it in good time. “Going to blow like hell at the weekend,” they say as you yarn on the dock, and they’re generally right.
As it happened, I was cruising the Little Belt at the time. This is one of the three passages into the Baltic through the many islands that form the State of Denmark. The western boundary of the Belt is the land mass of Jutland, so I had plenty of lee available. Inspection of the chart revealed the town of Haderslev on the Jutland shore. It lies at the top of a narrow eight-mile fjord open to the east at its seaward end, so you couldn’t
