In late June me and CJ had decided to do a canoe camping trip in Helge Å in Skåne. We had studied maps from Osby down to the ocean just south of Åhus, and had first decided to paddle from Osby to Broby or Knislinge. Just the day before the trip we changed our minds, and decided that we wanted to camp on the beach, and decided to paddle from Knislinge down to the ocean. What we didn't really consider was that it was a paddle of more than 50 km and that the river has a very slow flow that doesn't really help with the speed.
But we packed everything the evening before, drove to Knislinge, dropped off the canoe then drove down to Fiseboda nature reserve where we left my car, and drove back to Knislinge in CJs car. This was the logistics we needed to be able to get the canoe back the next day. When we drove that far we both realized that we wouldn't be able to paddle that far, and with a horrendous rain being forecasted the next day it looked like it could be a bad trip. None of us said anything though.
We got back to Knislinge, had a snack and then put the canoe into the river. The weather was great, and it was a beautiful river to paddle. There were ducks everywhere on the river. On one section we passed a dead deer, rotten and half decayed, stuck in branches in the water.
After a few hours of paddling we decided to take a break, and made landfall on an abandoned jetty.
On our break we both voiced our concerns about the distance and the incoming rain storm. After studiying the map we decided that we should paddle to Torsebro, and then take the bus to Furuboda and hike to Fiseboda nature reserve and camp there. We realized that trying to force ourselves to do the whole trip in bad weather would probably just make it a bad memory.
So we paddled the last stretch to Torsebro, locked the canoe to a tree and walked to the bus stop. We changed to another bus in Kristianstad and rode to the end station in Furuboda.
We hiked a couple of km to Fiseboda, followed Skåneleden for a while before we left it and found a really nice campsite in the sand dunes.
Setting up the tent in the dunes was challenging, and a freestanding tent would have been better. But we managed to get a good pitch. We hung out in the tent for a while before eating dinner. We had plans to go swimming, but there was a pretty heavy wind, and a lot of black seaweed that had blown in, so we abandoned the idea and got back to the tent.
It was a really nice evening, but as forecasted, the rain started during the night. It rained heavily in the morning, and we decided to skip breakfast all together, and just pack up everything instead. When we left the depression in the sand where we had camped, and came up on the ridge of the dunes the wind was a lot stronger than we thought. The dunes had protected us, so we hadn't noticed how much wind it actually was. We hiked back to the car in the rain, packed everything in and drove to Torsebro to pick up the canoe. After that we drove to Knislinge to pick up CJs car and drove home to her to dry everything up in front of the fireplace.
It had been a really nice trip, and we were both glad we had abandoned the initial plans to paddle everything in the rain. This way we got hours of nice paddling, hiking along the dunes and pine forest and a beautiful camp at the beach.
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