Kerteminde Havn

Kerteminde Havn is the long, narrow harbour canal where Kertinge Nor opens into Kerteminde Bay — the canal the town grew up around. It still holds the status of a commercial harbour, and that is worth knowing before you come alongside: this is not a marina but a working harbour you are allowed to lie in. The town's actual yacht harbour, Kerteminde Marina, lies north of the entrance and is run by the same harbour authority.

The division within the canal is simple. The north side is today used almost entirely by visiting yachts, excursion boats and old sailing ships. The south side is the commercial area, with a few larger cutters and many smaller fishing boats, and the fishing basin itself is reserved for registered cutters — visitors may not lie there. Visitors may, however, use the whole of Nordre Havnekaj, and the harbour dues are the same as in the marina. They are paid at the machine by the harbour office on Marinavejen 4 within four hours of arrival.

Entry requires a couple of figures. The harbour takes vessels up to 120 metres drawing no more than 4.2 metres. The difference between mean high and mean low water is half a metre, but winds from north-west through north to north-east can raise the level by a full metre, and southerlies can draw it down by eighty centimetres. Strong currents occur, shifting every six hours. A red and a green buoy lie some two hundred and fifty metres off the entrance, and the speed limit inside is three knots.

On Dosseringen, the quayside street of the old harbour, the wooden-ship association FOK has its home. It works to preserve the wooden-vessel community, has a clubhouse with workshop and common room, and members with wooden boats are given berths along the quay. There are weekly evening sails and participation in wooden-ship rallies. Further in are the dinghy pontoons, where the harbour's recreational fishermen and shore hunters keep their boats.

In the Middle Ages Kerteminde was the only legal shipping port between Nyborg to the south and Fyns Hoved to the north. As early as the mid-1300s the Langebro and a bulwark some two hundred metres long were built along the shore, and from the 1400s to the mid-1600s the town was Odense's regional trading hub — fish and farm produce out, timber and beer in, chiefly from Norway and northern Germany.

The railway to Odense in 1900 improved the market for fish so much that in 1913 a proper fishing harbour was decided on for the south side. First a mole angled out from the existing quay, another in 1933, and an extension of the oldest in the 1960s. Two fish canneries opened in 1916, and the fish auction followed in 1935. Drift-net herring fishing in late summer and autumn was the mainstay for centuries, and Kerteminde was Funen's largest fishing harbour. The auction closed in 2003.

Fish export, fishmongers and a smokehouse still occupy the harbour today, and fish can be bought straight off the cutters. Nordre Havnekaj has meanwhile been redeveloped with terraced houses, restaurants and shops and a promenade running on to the Fjord&Bælt centre. The ice works has been put up for sale — a concrete sign of where the commercial fishery is heading.