Lake Vänern is bigger than you'd think — it took many hours from Lurö, which is already right in the middle of Vänern, until we passed the tall bridge at Vänersborg. As we approached Vänersborg, we could hear on the VHF radio that India III had sailed faster than us through the rain; they were busy getting the bridges opened toward Vänersborg. Once we were in Vänersborg, we could hear them communicating with the locks before the static drowned out the talk.
We stayed overnight in Vänersborg, since we wouldn't have made it far enough before the bridges and locks closed for the day. We took a walk through the capital of Västra Götaland, and Jennifer pointed out the apartment she'd once lived in. We spent the rest of the evening at a restaurant, knowing we'd sailed the last leg of this adventure. When we woke up in the morning, our boat neighbours were already busy preparing their boats to continue their journey down the river; we quickly threw on some clothes and ran to the toilet. Shortly after the boat neighbours, we too were out on the water, waiting for the bridge opening.
In Trollhättan
🌐 we heard on the radio that they were waiting for us for a bridge opening, since there was already a lone Danish boat idling there that also wanted one. We arrived but couldn't see any bridge opening for quite a while. We got stressed, because there was supposed to be a running race that would block the bridge opening entirely for several hours. At the press of the VHF button I asked where the bridge opening had got to, and the answer we got was that they would open the bridge.
In Trollhättan we also discovered that the locks we'd been through on the Göta Canal were very small by comparison — and we had to learn that the hard way. When you're locked down, you make sure to have a line running from the boat up to the quay edge and back into the boat, so you can pay out more line as the water under the boat drops and keep control of the boat. As we stood there hoping the locking was over, because our line was starting to run out, we'd only come halfway. There were holes in the wall to make the line fast once more, which was a huge stroke of luck for us, since the length of our line wasn't enough.
Closer to Göteborg, our final destination, we could feel the rain as a good reminder that the west coast was near. Before heading on to Göteborg, we had to stay overnight in Kungälv, which completely lacks a guest harbour or any sort of arrangement for visiting boats. Long ago there used to be a guest harbour between Bohus Fortress and Kungälv; we went in there, through the narrow passage between the reeds, to scout the situation. The jetty that had once been a guest berth was facing the wrong way and completely unusable. We borrowed an empty berth on the sly to look into things more closely. At a café we asked how it worked; they shrugged and said the municipality gives no answers. We spotted a few faces we recognised from a German boat we'd locked through with on the Göta Canal, and asked where they'd moored. On the other side of Bohus Fortress there was a waiting jetty for those waiting on a bridge opening. We hopped back in the boat and moved over there. The evening was spent at a very nice Italian restaurant in Kungälv.
