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studying charts, having learned map reading during his military service. Me, I preferred to be at the helm. We’d take turns there, but if the weather worsened, I’d take over the wheel. We started out by buying Josephine, and we kept that name because a change would have brought bad luck. She was a secondhand motorboat, mahogany, twenty-eight feet, built in 1954, the year Stieg was born. When we began sailing, however, we always rented our boats. As a pair we functioned perfectly well, almost via osmosis. Once, whipped by a ferocious wind, the boom broke loose, and as our friend Eleanor watched in amazement, Stieg and I immediately cobbled together an emergency tie-up with some military webbing belts—without needing to exchange a single word.

Josephine‘s home port was Arsta, where Mikael goes to exchange Christmas presents with his ex-wife and daughter Pernilla in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Thanks to all our trips back and forth, Stieg and I knew the area well.

When Lisbeth decides to strong-arm her way into the apartment of Per-Ake Sandstrom, the pimp “journalist” who is Dag Svensson’s informant, she equips herself at Watski, a hardware store on Erstagatan in Stockholm. That was where Stieg and I bought everything we needed for boating. I particularly remember an anchor and chain that must have weighed more than sixty-five pounds, and which I lugged through the Arsta forest all the way to Josephine.

To tie up Sandstrom, Lisbeth uses a clove hitch, a knot Stieg and I tied and retied for whole evenings to get right. As for her little Minolta 8x binoculars, they’re the ones we always had in our pockets when we were sailing, to help us spot seamarks and stay on course.

We knocked around quite a lot at the top of the archipelago, too, up by Arholma, the most northerly island, where Blomkvist meets the old school chum who gives him the idea to write about Wennerstrom. The guest marina there is as busy as Stieg says, and boats really have to crowd together to leave a few spaces for latecomers. I’ve never understood the strange popularity of the place, because it’s the favorite summer resort of enormous mosquitoes, twice as big as normal, which feast on visitors all night long.

After Holger Palmgren retired, the lawyer Nils Erik Bjurman became Lisbeth’s legal guardian, and this vile character owns a second home in Stallarholmen. Stieg and I often put in there with Josephine whenever we were touring Lake Malaren during the summer.

Bjurman’s friend Gunnar Bjorck, the assistant chief of the immigration division within Sapo and a member of the Section, tries to hide at the end of the trilogy by going way out to Landsort, a village on the island of Oja, where he rents a guest room in an old lighthouse. For several autumns in a row, Stieg and I sailed south along the archipelago, heading for Landsort, and each time we had to cut our trip short because of bad weather. After hours of fighting gray seas and contrary winds, we’d turn back, discouraged by how little headway we’d made. One summer, frustrated by those setbacks, we took a room in the lighthouse and spent several days there, just so we could finally see the island at least one time!

In the last part of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Mikael has an affair with the stunning Inspector Monica Figuerola, the Sapo policewoman assigned to Lisbeth Salander’s case. While he’s staying in the little wooden cabin out at Sandhamn, he goes to get her at the ferry dock, and that same night they have dinner together outside on the veranda. Figuerola questions Blomkvist about his real relationship with Lisbeth, and at one point she watches an Amigo 23 chugging past, heading for the marina with its navigation lights glowing.

One autumn, when rental prices had dropped a bit but the weather had been less cooperative, Stieg and I rented one of these pretty little sailboats with the simply sublime interior finished with precious hardwoods. She was very stable but rather sluggish, especially with the wind astern, which was what we had to deal with for several days. I was grumbling