Our three men, Juho, Ari and Klaus have done all the men's work: hammering the walls with electrical tools, maintaining the generator and all the other work with electricity and engines. But they have as well participated in the cleaning of living spaces and kitchen work. Chopping wood, making terrace furniture and making repairs to various things here and there are part of their everyday chores.

One of the tasks has been cleaning of the four large water tanks in the cellar - altogether 7 cubic meters by volume. Exciting task was also assisting the police in removing old trotyl rolls from the attic. The trotyl was earlier used in fog alarm bombs which were exploded in certain intervals to inform the boats where the lighthouse and the shoal is.

Juho has done a lot of nature observations and is often seen with his binoculars looking for birds, seals and approaching boats. Klaus has fetched guests from their boats with a rowing or inflated motor boat. It is a challenging task because of the tricky waters with lot of stones in shallow waters.

Klaus works in the information technology branch and lives in Helsinki. For some time he lived in Oulu, which is the ICT-city in the North. He has a long relationship with the sea - as a child he spent his summers in the archipelago near Turku. Today he has a motorboat together with a friend. He is also active in the voluntary search and rescue associaton. When coming to Märket he was looking forward to the total presence of the sea. He is also interested in the history of the lighthouses and of course of the seals. And his hopes have been fulfilled. He has been surprised how beautiful the island is though there is hardly anything else but rock.

Ari is also from Helsinki. He works in Uusimaa Regional Council in the information department. He wants to point out that on Märket there is the border of three municipalities, of two Swedish provinces and the Aland self-governmental area and of course of two countries! Ari has taken up sailing only for some years ago. He is interested in the sea but also in the protection of historical buildings. He thought before that Märket is in the middle of eternal seascape, but in reality you can see both Finland and Sweden from here. He also hoped to possibly see even one seal but was positively surprised of seeing so many. He heard somewhere that there are 26000 grey seals in the Baltic sea. Today - naturally after work - we made a trip close - but not too close - to a seals' rocky island. And we saw at least a hundred of them!


Klaus heading to seal`s rocky island

Today the coast guard visited the island and took with them some of their old equipment. And the policewomen - Maria Nygård and Nina Rasmus - came to gather the trotyl which there was not so much as they had expected.


The policewomen plus Ari, Juho and Aino finding the trotyle rolls

And there was a lot of other visitors: the Rosenlöf family, the Hautala family from Raisio, Mr Rönnberg from Tammisaari - all on their own boats. In the evening came the Nyman family from Espoo and the Perttula couple from Susikas on Bengt Granberg's boat from and back to Käringsundsby.


Bengt Granberg arriving to the north harbour

We received also a new member: Marcus who is from Aland. We'll tell more about him later.

Siida of Märket