Varbjerg Havn

Varbjerg Havn lies on Båring Vig in the northern part of the Little Belt, between Middelfart and Bogense. It is a small club harbour with fifty-five berths, owned and run by the Varbjerg motorboat club, and it has never taken public funding. Every berth is privately owned — buying into one costs thirty-five thousand kroner — so there are no dedicated visitor berths. Visiting crews are welcome, but are assigned a free berth by the harbour master.

Size and depth set the terms. The basin is about seventy-five by sixty metres, boats may be no more than eight and a half metres long and three metres wide, and the club advises against entry with more than eighty centimetres of draught. This is a harbour for motorboats and small craft, not for keelboats.

The approach needs planning. The harbour can normally be entered from two hours after low water until two hours before the next — outside that window there is not enough water. Coming in, the posts must be kept to port at a distance of two to three metres; there are three red port-hand marks and one green starboard mark in the channel. Because the entrance is so narrow, a reversed rule applies: outbound traffic gives way to inbound. Crews without local knowledge are advised not to enter in strong north-westerly winds.

The harbour exists because the old landing place at the mouth of the Storå had become too cramped. Thirty men founded the club at Sølyst on the twenty-seventh of May 1967, and when the contractor's quote for digging a nine-hundred-square-metre basin came to a hundred and sixty thousand kroner, the members reckoned they could do it for forty. The municipality made the ground available, the restaurateur at Varbjerghus provided land east of the stream, and the harbour was built in large part from materials salvaged from the closed Bogense railway. Seventeen more berths were added in 1972.

Silting has shadowed the place ever since. In the mid-seventies there were plans for a larger harbour a hundred metres offshore, meant to provide space and solve the problem at once, but the state water works authority would only permit it on condition that the construction did not cause the sea to strip material from the coast elsewhere. That was a risk nobody was willing to take. Around 2005 the members themselves drove new steel piles and rebuilt the bulwarks and decking.

Just outside the harbour lies something that exists nowhere else. In the spring of 2023 a stone reef was laid at the mouth of the Storå — the world's first smolt reef, built specifically to shelter young sea trout from cormorants and predatory fish during the critical passage from stream to sea. It holds some two thousand four hundred cubic metres of stone and covers a hectare, and doubles as a snorkelling reef close inshore. It was opened in October 2023 as part of the Belt in Balance project under Little Belt Nature Park.

Varbjerg beach west of the harbour is a child-friendly sand and shingle strand with a toilet building, tables and benches, and step-free access to the bathing pier with a bathing wheelchair. Fifty metres from the basin stands the Varbjerg ice-cream house, with outdoor seating and a view over the bay. Note the conservation zone at the mouth of the Storå: fishing is prohibited for the first five hundred metres east of the car park, because the stream is a spawning watercourse.