On a visit to Denmark to stay with my long time pen friend Tenna, and her family, I also managed to catch up with some other kayaking friends I'd never met before. I caught up with Bente, and her friend and mentor Ron, first, on the island of Fyn. Many years ago Ron had built a wooden sea kayak and fitted a sail to it, but hasn't used it for years. Also many years ago Bente had made a sail for her kayak but never got it fitted to her kayak. So I had a look at Ron's kayak and decided it was the best kayak the club had to lend - better than all the nice new shiny fibreglass sea kayaks the club owns. Bente sewed up a sail holder for the deck and I made some changes to the deck layout before paddling, and at that stage only had Bente's sail to try - it was huge. She had copied one of the sails off my website, but chose the biggest one, the one Jeff Jennings used to have on his old Greenlander. This was bigger than anyone else in the Maatsuyker Club used and quite often bent his mast. When I got to paddle Ron's kayak I found it to be terribly unstable, not the sort of kayak you can put the  paddle across the deck to take photos, and the mast step was too close to the cockpit. Getting the sail up was quite challenging and it was lucky it was a calm sort of day, and got calmer.

The next time I tried it again Ron had managed to find his old sail which was a bit smaller than Bente's so I took that along to paddle in the Southern Fyn Archipelago out to a couple of islands with Bente. Even this was larger than I would have made it and again it was lucky the wind was light. But I had fun, it was interesting to paddle with people on the other side of the world.

 Ron and Bente checking out Ron's kayak.

Bente

The other sail.

So if paddling in a really tippy sea kayak wasn't bad enough, young Tenna talked me into paddling a TK1 - her Father's.
We did 14km in under 2 hours, but I think Tenna probably could have done it in 1 1/2 hours without me along.
That's the problem with paddling with a girl who was Junior Kayak Champion of Denmark at the age of 12.

Having passed the test, she then planned a 47km trip for us next week.

Big River Boat Jazz festival while we were in Silkeborg - jazz bands on 7 river boats, plus at venues all round town.

But I think this is probably the way to go on these waterways, an all girl rowing crew.
Not racing boats, just stable boats for the general public to get around in.

And I got to be a royal watcher as the queen was in town to open a special display at the museum.

I did think of dashing over and telling her I was also from Tasmania, as well as Mary.

The 47km paddle was a bit of a disaster for me - the seat was very uncomfortable and I just had to get ashore every hour to get out of it. The route was via lakes and joining rivers, and a couple of portages as well across major roads.

After 4 hours I was practically at a standstill and made very slow progress after that, with Tenna waiting patiently everytime I had to go ashore and rest.

I was very glad to finally arrive at the town of Ry where we decided I would wait for Tenna's mother to pick me up after work, and Tenna would continue on her training paddle for thr Tour de Gudena in September. I had a very pleasant 2 hours in a small port in Ry with a few old ferries and a lot of canoeing and kayak activity.

We did a lot more paddling on the river and lakes near Silkeborg - one trip I used Tenna's father's sea kayak for a 34km paddle, but all the others were in the TK1..

I was in Denmark for 6 weeks, and saw a lot of mid and southern Jutland - museums, art galleries, dykes and locks, old towns, burial mounds to name a few. It was an extremely pleasant time with Bente, and with Tenna's family - a very memorable trip right when I needed to get away from the empty house in Tasmania.