The West Coast Archipelago

The Swedish west coast offers a distinctly different form of an archipelago, not at all like the islands and peninsulas that can be found in the Stockholm archipelago on the east coast. On the west coast, the cliffs and the outer islands are bare, without a single tree on them.

The Swedish islands included in the west coast archipelago can, with a few exceptions, be found in the regional district of Bohuslän, situated between the Swedish city of Gothenburg (Göteborg) in the south and the Svinessund border of Norway in the north.

Bohuslän also has the only fjord to be found in Sweden, Gullmjarsfjorden. (The fjords in Norway are both bigger and, of course, outnumbers the silly little one we have in Sweden.) More info about the Swedish archipelago can be found on this canoe homepage.



Tara overlooking the boats lined up at the gas station.

Tara with some fisherman "closets" down by the harbor.

(Above pictures from Havstenssund, point 5 on the map above)

The northern archipelago around the little fishing village of Havstenssund between Strömstad and Grebbestad is very fragmented with high, steep rocky islands and islets.


(Caroline, Tara and Patrik in the cute litte boating community of Grebbestad.)

We continued our trip to Fjällbacka, number 6 on the map above. The archipelago of Fjällbacka has probably the greatest number of islands and islets in Bohuslän. These are hilly and lie closely together, separated by a labyrint of narrow passages and inlets, which are fascinating to paddle around. Porsholmen, Hjärterön, Florön and Vedholmen together with Hamnholmarna are the names of some well-known islands worth visiting.

In the evening, when the sky cseemed to be a little bit too cloudy, we headed across the island of Orust (7) and ended up on Patrik's old home island of Tjörn (9) , and came just in time for a hot meal down in the Skärhamn marina where the guest boats were crammed together...