More rain, more Rødvig

The rain eased a bit in the night but returned at full pelt by getting-up time. In addition Camilla woke up with a headache which has continued to trouble her all day. And the waves are still big enough to make the prospect of entering the Bøgestrøm decidedly unattractive. Just in case we needed any more incentives to stay, the German boat rafted up to us wasn't moving, and Sam found a British boat, Lady Cressida, who invited us for drinks tonight. So we didn't move.

In the late morning we went out to discover all that Rødvig has to offer. We visited the Ships' Engines museum, which has a wonderful collection, mostly of diesel engines from around 1918 to the 1960s, but plenty of other oddities including a couple of British Seagull outboards. We got in for somewhat less than the going rate because they were desperate for change, so just took all Sam's small money and let us in. It's run by volunteers, who all apparently troop in on a Wednesday evening to work on the engines. The chap on the desk spoke excellent English (of course) and started up a couple of Junkers engines for our entertainment. One had been recovered from an E-boat at the end of the war, spent 20 years as a working engine out in Greenland, and is now 79 years old, still all original and starting on a swing of the handle. It seemed to have two vertically opposed pistons, not sure if we got that right. When we left he was explaining the engine to our German harbour neighbours, in fluent German.

Other than that Rødvig offers a small private railway with no sign of trains today, a baker/grocer/minimarket/video rental store, one posh restaurant, two cafés, and a boatbuilder - who was running a noisy extractor right by our boat this morning, but fortunately turned it off at lunchtime.

We also discovered that the green ticket which Sam obtained from the harbour ticket machine actually says "sorry, your credit card transaction has failed", in Danish. It takes you through the transaction in English but if it doesn't like your card it reverts to Danish, which is slightly unhelpful. Fortunately this happens quite often and we were able to pay the harbourmaster in cash.

We spent a pleasant couple of hours on board Lady Cressida, an Island Packet 42 from the Solent. Jonty and Mrs Jonty (memory failure, sorry) have kept her in the Baltic for four years and are overwintering at Augustenborg, so we may well see them again over the next couple of weeks. We also discussed the dreaded Bøgestrøm - it seems two Dutch yachts set off this morning but came back after seeing breaking waves at the entrance. The word is that it should probably be better tomorrow afternoon, when the wind is due to go slightly more southerly, or failing that on Sunday when the wind goes properly SE and moderates. Camilla has used almost all her 25MB daily data allowance on the iPhone looking at weather charts. Hopefully the upload of this blog post won't bust the limit....