Text: Klaas Voget; Photos: Robert Almquist
North of Copenhagen it blew through for two days, reason enough to check out the possibilities. Mikkel, my Danish contact for the region, texted me a quick "could be epic" into my mobile phone when I asked, while my Swedish World Cup colleague Andreas Olandersson expressed similar sentiments about his local options. My digital scouting of spot recommendations led to an abrupt mood high when I opened a small but beautiful photo of a surfer near a small Swedish town called Skäret. I felt like a treasure hunter and decided to take the ferry the next morning.
It didn't even take long. After five and a half hours, I was standing at the spot my Swedish friends had sent me to. Coincidentally, this forecast fell exactly on the weekend, so my friend was also happy about this spontaneous trip. We travelled on the Scandlines ferries from Puttgarden to Rødby and then on from Helsingør to Helsingborg. Then on through a few picturesque villages. We drove past butikken and a restaurant with a pavilion in the garden. After a first spot check, my "eufori" was limited. The waves were very small and the wind was just strong enough to get us planing. We were the first car at the spot, but after a short time a fully packed small car arrived and the occupants frantically set up their sails. Had they seen something that I had missed? No, I thought, and suggested to my friend that we should have lunch first and come back in two hours.
Back at the spot, we could barely find a parking space. The windsurfers from the region seem to know about the treasure that lies on their doorstep. The locals gave me a very friendly welcome, although some asked me not to reveal the name of the spot when I saw the camera to avoid invading the nature reserve and overcrowding the spot on good days. At this point, it should be said that the spot is not really for wave beginners. The wave breaks in front of quite sharp and very smooth stone slabs and there are two or three boulders lurking just below the surface in the middle of the break, some of which are difficult to see. If you look past this and search a little, you will find a spot that could hardly be more perfectly designed. The reef plate over which the wave breaks drops evenly into the sea and has the potential for a perfect breaking left-hand wave. If this constellation was in a place with a regular swell, this spot would certainly be world-famous.
In the Kattegatt, however, there are rarely enough waves for the spot to show its face. The forecast was good, but even after our lunch the waves weren't really more than waist-high. In the meantime, Andreas Olandersson had also driven up with his brother. He assured me that the waves would build up very quickly here and rigged his 4.2 sail, as the wind had picked up considerably in the meantime. The sky was also darkening and forming spectacular cloud formations.
Maybe I just underestimated the waves from the car park a few hundred metres away, because when I mingled with the Swedish wave scene a quarter of an hour later, my first wave was already a good head-high and broke much more powerfully than I had expected.
Robert Almqvist, a photographer from Halmstadt, unpacked his 300mm lens and caught a few golden moments when the sun had somehow cheated its way through the thick clouds. We surfed with around 25 others until it was completely dark. Robert was thrilled and cancelled his plans for the next morning at six o'clock.
