The unique Stockholm, Åland and Turku archipelagos

When friends who are planning to visit Sweden and Finland ask for advise about what to see and do, I always recommend one of the cheapest "luxury" cruises on offer - the day passenger/car ferry from Stockholm to Turku (Åbo in Swedish) in Finland.

The ship departs in the morning and arrives in Turku in good time for dinner - or vice versa. You can enjoy the journey any time of the year - in the winter months the sometimes rather extreme ice conditions may be interesting to observe - but during the summer you can fully enjoy the unique Stockholm, Åland and Turku archipelagos with their thousands of islands and skerries.

The Scottish M.P. A MacCallum Scott, who travelled by ship from Stockholm to Åbo in 1908 gives a wonderful account of his journey through the Åbo archipelago in his book "Through Finland to St. Petersburg":

"About twenty or thirty miles before the Finnish mainland comes in sight the navigator begins to encounter numbers of small rocky islands. Rounded shoulders of black granite, all wet and glittering from the waves which wash over them, rise a few feet above the surface of the water like the back of some sea monster."
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"The further the vessel proceeds the larger and more rugged these islands become. This rocky wilderness has a very wild and desolate appearance. Here and there a single fir-tree stands erect like a sentinel, and occasionally a few dwarf pines and stunted bushes afford a patch of green on which to rest the eyes. Landwards, along the northern horizon, stretches a dark green zone of forest which, at first, is taken for mainland; but as the vessel approaches it is found to consist of a labyrinth of islands thickly covered with pine and fir.  This wonderful archipelago stretches along the whole of the southern coast of Finland. The islands are so numerous that, as the vessel threads its way between them, it seems to be completely land-locked. At every turning it seems to enter a cul-de-sac, but, as it pushes forward, a passage, hidden by some wooded cape, opens up. The sheltered waters have a surface like a mirror, reflecting the wooded shore and the blue sky, and the only waves are those caused by the wash from the vessel rushing along the shore on either side."

This 1910 map of southwestern Finland shows the myriad of islands in the Åbo archipelago

In the late 19th century the life of a fisherman was not always easy in the archipelago, as this famous painting by the Finnish artist Alberg Edelfelt shows.