LAKES, ISLANDS AND ANCIENT EGYPT

Ann Fraser

"Are you an opera buff?" An unusual preamble to cruising in Finland with Tony and Jill Vasey in Shiant, but it set the focus for the whole trip - a performance of Aida in the magic setting of a medieval castle in the Finnish lakes at the Savonlinna Opera Festival.

The Commodore, Mary Barton, and I flew to Helsinki on 3rd July and joined ship at the NJK Yacht Club on a small island in Helsinki's South Harbour where Shiant was moored, in company with the three American boats which had arrived for the OCC Baltic Rally that weekend. Willy Ker was also there for a great reunion, having just arrived from sailing with Miles Clark in Wild Goose via North Cape, Murmansk and Archangel.

We were immediately launched into a social whirl, starting with Happy Hour on Bill and Pam Kellett's Islay, a Rival 38, where we met up with Don and Sandy Mackenzie on Mystick, and Don and Nan Kaplan and their guests on Silhouette. We were joined by our Finnish friend Max Ekholm, sailor and opera critic, who had suggested the idea of combining Shiant's Baltic cruise with a visit to the opera festival. He also helped organise the Rally Dinner in the clubhouse of the NJK, who gave us a traditional Finnish meal ending with golden cloudberries and made us welcome throughout our stay.

Helsinki's waterfront skyline is dominated by the dark red onion domes of Uspensky Orthodox Cathedral and the magnificent dome of St Nicholas, the Lutheran Cathedral. This and much else about Finland's capital reflects its history. Ruled for 600 years by Sweden - there is still a large Swedish-speaking population - Finland suffered from repeated Russian invasions and from wars between Sweden and Russia during the 15th and 16th centuries. The Grand Duchy of Finland was finally absorbed into the Russian Empire in 1808, but snatched its hard-won independence during the Russian Revolution.

The harbour scene is also dominated at times by super-size Swedish cruise ships and smaller Estonian ferries from Tallinn bringing a regular influx of tourists. Open-air market stalls under orange umbrellas on the quayside are piled high with fruit, vegetables and mounds of luscious strawberries. At a fish stall Jill and I watched fascinated as the owner cut, filleted and lavishly scattered with dill and coarse salt the pink flesh of a salmon trout, making gravlax, the while he held forth in fluent and rapid English about the effect of the Common Market on Finnish fish sales.

Awaiting Estonian visas we sailed to Porvoo, about 50 kilometres (30 miles) along the coast, through a maze of pine-wooded islands. Only later did I realise we were not still in inland waters. Smooth water and swing bridges opening to let us through added to this impression. Weekend chalets painted child's paintbox colours - crimson, ochre, burnt umber and sienna - and water's edge saunas on islets of rose granite, pumice-smooth, reminded us of Maine.

Buoyage is based on the cardinal system, but with black and yellow plastic tubes instead of iron pillars. A slight difficultly is the lack of topmarks and that the top section of north marks is hard to see against the trees.

Porboo (Borga in Swedish) is an old town, founded by Danish Vikings and centre of the Swedish cultural community. We moored up between posts US style (not without difficulty, as Shiant filled the available space to capacity) in a tree-fringed marina near the town, alongside Islay, who had left ahead of us and now plied us with smoked salmon and cold drinks.

Our enthusiasm for sightseeing next day was dampened by deluging rain. We sheltered in the small Gothic cathedral overlooking the town, under the gaze of Czar Alexander I who granted Finland religious freedom in 1809.

Sailing back to Helsinki we called in at the yard where Shiant was to be laid up for the winter. Taking advantage of the long evenings (not dark until 2300) we anchored for the night in the lee of Grisselholm. We had a great sail back in smooth sea, sparkling light and warm sunshine, but with a distinctly cool wind. Islay, returning two days later, came in looking very battered and windswept, having beat back the whole way against a fresh breeze.

On Shiant's folding bikes, Mary and I cycled round Helsinki using the pavement cycle tracks, which pedestrians ignore at their peril. We topped up ship's supplies at the state-run Alko stores, the only place you are allowed to buy booze in Finland. Everywhere we found courtesy and an astonishing command of English. Searching for the Sibelius memorial, we asked some workers mending the road. "Just over there" they answered "You can't miss it". Imagine a British workman replying in French.

Tallinn and Estonia awaited us. The 50 mile passage across the Gulf of Finland brought us to the entrance to the Olympic Centre at Pirita, near Tallinn, in the early evening. We checked into the customs jetty, where we were greeted with big smiles and presented with Marlboro baseball caps.

The towers and spires of Tallinn, visible across the bay, had to wait for the morrow while we made our mark with the Olympic Yacht Club office in the bleak and decaying concrete Olympic Centre. We tied up alongside a large Estonian yacht whose skipper gave us five dozen eggs (`one of tomorrow's crew works for an egg combine') and got our gas bottles filled. Estonians are fanatically keen sailors. Virtually all boats are company or trade union owned, and the motley crowd aboard the next day bore little resemblance to your average `yottie' but were clearly having a great time.

The soulless Viru Hotel where we changed our money into the new Estonian currency (12 kroon to $1, 22 kroon to œ1) might have been in Moscow or Leningrad, but Estonia's true character soon triumphed. Old Tallinn was a medieval citadel, built on Toompea Hill overlooking an important Hanseatic port. It's an enchanted city of spires and turrets, massive stone walls and conical-roofed towers and cobbled, winding streets. Over the centuries invasions by the Danes, Swedes and Russians have all left their mark.

We had coffee under red Marlboro umbrellas in the square of the Raekoda, the old Town Hall, with its distinctive spire. Climbing the steps of Short Leg Street towards Toompea, Mary and I found Tony and Jill emerging from the garishly-ochre Russian Orthodox Church. Toompea Hill is crowned by the immense citadel walls and the historic tower of Tall Hermann, from which the blue, black and white flag of independent Estonia was flying. All the towers and bastions of the walled city carry evocative names like Paks (Fat) Margareta, Pilstiker (the Arrow Sharpener) and the 14th century red-roofed Kiek-in-de-Kok (Peek-into-the-Kitchen) artillery tower, with its four-metre thick walls.

Tucked away in a courtyard we found a lively lunch-spot, Easy Freddie's, crowded with tourists, and asked two pretty blonde girls if we could share their table. Eva and Elena were both Estonian. Eva, whose English was fluent, had been living in Sweden for four years, while Elena still lived in Tallinn with her husband and small baby. Prompted by our curiosity, they told us of the changes since independence from Soviet domination. Whereas people had been silent, afraid to talk, they now felt able to express themselves. Many things had yet to improve and they held out little hope of our getting fresh fruit and vegetables, except maybe from the roadside in the country, where we were going next day.

Saturday afternoon at the supermarket (nicknamed the `Food Pood', pood being shop in Estonian) was depressingly like being in Moscow. Row upon row of large jars of pinking-brown anonymous fruit-water, pickled red cabbage and beetroot, what should have been freezer bins filled with tinned fish - herring or tuna - and scrawny broiler chickens and rather fatty pieces of beef and pork. Nevertheless, Estonians manage shortages with cheerfulness and resourcefulness; we had an excellent lunch of grilled fish with a bottle of Moldavian wine for œ2.50 for four, and later had a pleasant dinner at Reeder's, where Elena's husband was a waiter, for not much more.

Next day, in a hired car, we went to Parn on the Gulf of Riga, both an attractively laid-out spa town and a less salubrious port. We found the marina in the harbour, but searching for a swim on the guide books's `silver-sanded shoreline ... blessed by gentle winds and undulating waves' found only reed-covered mudflats and a distant lighthouse. Redirected by a voluble lady responding to my two words of Estonian, we realised Tony was in a minority of one among the nude bathing belles on the silver sands and hastily removed him to the Mixed Bathing area, where an economically-amended notice read: `This beach is not (crossed out) suitable for swimming'.

Sailing back to Finland we started in hot sunshine, shorts and bikinis. In mid-afternoon a thunderstorm and a vicious squall hit us before we could get the reefs in and provided a few hectic moments when the main halliard hooked itself in the mast steps.

Re-entering Finland at Pirttisaari, Tony and an overzealous customs man had a slight disagreement over the amount of wine aboard. Tony won. The next day we reached through the islands towards Kotka, a large timber processing port 160 kilometres (100 miles) to the west of Helsinki. Sailing in smooth water between dozens of wooded islands it was difficult to believe we were still sailing along the coast, and a busy chain-ferry near our lunchtime stop to buy smoked salmon and strawberries at a waterfront supermarket added to this illusion.

Kotka is a modern town with good facilities, though of little architectural merit. We moored at the yacht club, which was friendly and hospitable and busy making preparations for the Tall Ships' Race the following week. A bus took us to the Czar's fishing lodge on the banks of the Langinkoski rapids, built for Alexander III and the Empress Dagmar as a holiday retreat where they could indulge the fantasy of being simple folk and the Czarina could whip up suppers for her husband and children.

From then on we were heading for the Saimaa Canal and our goal of Savonlinna in the Saimma Lakeland. The Saimaa Canal, opened in 1856, links Lake Saimaa with the Gulf of Finland. After the Russian occupation of the eastern province of Karelia in World War II, part of the canal lay in Russian territory and fell into disuse. It was reopened in the 1960s, when Finland leased back the Soviet zone from Vyborg to the Finnish border and the canal underwent major reconstruction.

Although Finnish yachts had been able to enter the canal from the Gulf, this was the first year foreign boats were allowed through and there was a great deal of excitement and anticipation, as well as bureaucracy. A Russian pilot through the Russian sector was mandatory and instructions were that boats should muster at Santio Island, on the Finnish/Russian border, the previous evening and be at the Russian Pilot Station at Povorotnyj at midday precisely.

We had an exhilarating sail from Kotka in a stiff south-westerly, under a clear sky with puffy white clouds rimming the horizon, threading our way through the islands, closer and closer to Santio, where we could see a line of white buoys marking the frontier and Russia in the distance. Moored up in Santio for the night, surrounded by fifteen Swedish boats on their way to Vyborg, we went below and discovered water up to the floorboards. A hose had come adrift from the engine water inlet and the pumps were kept busy while the boats jostled each other in the stiff breeze coming from Russia.

At midday, having had a splendid spinnaker run during which a hurried piece of restitching of a Netherlands flag enabled us to hoist the white, blue and red courtesy flag of the Confederation of Independent States, we called up Vihrevoj Radio and were told to anchor in company with the Swedish boats. Two hours later the pilot boarded Shiant and, taking the wheel, led the fleet to Vysotsk, where a crowd of optimistic touts on the dockside, armed with bottles of vodka, champagne - and even `good water - very cheap' tried to win themselves some hard currency.

In the noisy confusion, a khaki-clad man with an official stamp ran from boat to boat inspecting papers, the Vyborg-bound Swedish contingent peeled off and we set off again at 8 knots, the smaller boats trailing behind. The pilot, a taciturn man, accepted Jill's offer of Marlboro cigarettes and tea and left us at the first lock, Brusnitchnoe, saying he had a freighter to take down, which was just coming into the lock under the bascule bridge. Snatching a moment in the heads, I heard a thunder of jackboots and a cry from Jill and emerged to find an embarrassed customs officer beating a hasty retreat to the dockside.

With our now small group of five Finnish boats we chugged up through the canal's eight big locks, lifting us 75 metres in all, attaching ourselves to hooks on the floating bollards. Hedgerows of roses and potentilla lined the locks and diving birds plunged for fish in the canal stretches. Russian cargo freighters and heavily laden timber ships crossed us at intervals. At the fifth lock, Palli, the last in the Russian sector, smoke belched from the chimney of a big motor boat ahead. `That's his sauna' said the rotund middle-aged couple on the boat beside us, `all small boats have saunas'.

As dusk approached, the convoy hurried towards the Finnish border at Nuijamaa, where we checked back into Finland and anchored for the night. Once clear of the last lock at Malkia, where we paid our dues, the canal widened out into Lake Saimma and its thousand islands.

We still had several days' sailing to reach Savonlinna and had our first encounter with massive log rafts - thousands of logs chained together in a mile-long tow and often half a mile or more behind the towing tug. On bends in the channel a second tug would nose the log raft into obedience. Between them, they are a distinct hazard. The approach to Savonlinna, heavily buoyed and resembling a croquet lawn through binoculars, was enlivened by realising that what we had thought was a stationary tug on a bend was actually the second tug nuzzling at a log raft and that the towing tug and cable were uncomfortably close.

We moored up in the marina close to Olavinlinna Castle, our lines taken by three Swedish girls on the next boat, elegantly dressed for that evening's opera, Fidelio. The fortress, with its three round towers and encircling walls, is on a small island and was built in the 15th century as a defence against Russian invaders and named after St Olav of Norway. As an aperitif to tomorrow's excitement, we strolled across the pontoon bridge to the floodlit castle.

Like us, nearly all the crews in the marina were headed for the opera, including those off the Swedish boats with whom we had shared the Saimma Canal and whose Commodore we met later. Aida did not disappoint - the golden splendour of an Egyptian sun god's temple created in the castle courtyard - the soaring voices of the Triumphal March - an evening to be remembered.

Next day we toured the castle. Through the arrow-slits high above the lake one could imagine the attacking hordes of history - and there, leaning forlornly against the stone wall, was the tarnished splendour of last night's sun god.

It was time for Mary and me to fly home and leave Tony and Jill to continue their Baltic cruise.

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