Gisseløre Lystbådehavn

Gisseløre Marina lies in Houget, the shallow bay at the head of Kalundborg Fjord on the west coast of Zealand, immediately west of the town's commercial port. The harbour exists because of the spit it is named after: Gisseløre is a curved bar of stone and sand that the current along the southern shore of Røsnæs has pushed out into the fjord over centuries. It lies across the approach like a natural breakwater, and the water inside stays flat almost regardless of what is blowing outside.

You come in from the east along a marked channel that begins just west of the corner where the moles of Kalundborg Vesthavn meet. The marks are worth taking seriously: red poles east of the outer pontoon follow the edge of a shallow flat, and there is very little water outside the line. Inside the harbour the limit is three knots.

The layout is a single basin with floating pontoons running out from the shore — the east, middle, cross and rigging pontoons, some 220 berths in all. Off the east pontoon sits a small stone skerry the sailors call Mågeøen, Gull Island. The clubhouse and the hardstanding are on the landward side to the west, where Kalundborg Sejlklub was at home long before the pontoons arrived; a photograph from 1959 shows the club's old boatyard on much the same ground.

The marina shares the peninsula with the Kalundborg radio station, for many years the Danish state broadcaster's main transmitter for the whole country — hence the name of the access road, Radiovej. The rowing club adjoins to the east. Walk out along the spit and the view opens back across the fjord towards the medieval upper town, with the five towers of Vor Frue Kirke on one side and the industrial plants of Asnæs on the other. It is an unusual pairing to lie moored between.