ANDREW EAMES warms to the untouched beauty and relaxed pace of life on Sweden's west coast

A SEAGULL ate my breakfast at the Strandflickorna Hotel. I'd just piled up a good plateful, placed it on a table in the elegant garden and gone inside to fill up on lingonberry juice when there was what could only be described as a kerfuffle outside.

I poked my head out just in time to see a giant gull heading in a north/ north-easterly direction with my bread roll. The other guests were amused and I can't say I begrudged the bird a bit extra.

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After a couple of days island-hopping I was feeling particularly well-fed on a menu of seafood that a seabird might have thought was its birthright, so it was only fair that the birds could have a taste of mine.

I was travelling down the Bohuslän Coast, a stretch of Sweden's western shoreline which is adorned with a confetti of more than 8,000 islands, many of them inhabited and interlinked with a web of ferries and bridges.

Little more than an hour's drive from Gothenburg, it's a small-boat paradise of sheltered beaches, secret channels, shore-front restaurants and little villages made up of fishermen's cabins clustered on stilts on the rocks.

My room at the Strandflickorna in the town of Lysekil was just that, a cabin with a glass end so that I could lie in bed, listen to the waves lap around the cabin's legs and wave at yachts as they glided by. Travelling through these islands, it quickly becomes clear that this is where winsome youngsters re-enact the Swedish equivalent of Swallows And Amazons, living out their gentle nautical adventures in dappled sunlight among hide and seek islands, just as if they were being photographed for designer magazines.

Amid such a patchwork of land and sea, it is not always easy to tell whether you're looking across to another island or a piece of the mainland. But it becomes obvious when you're reaching the outer edge of the islands because the vegetation gives up the battle against spray and prevailing wind and the fishing villages are perched like clusters of barnacles on bare spangles of rock.

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Here menus, too, become more simple.

It's fish, fish or more fish. High-quality, fresh, innovative and not too expensive because Sweden is outside the eurozone.

In a restaurant called Brygghuset, a short ferry ride across the water from the Strandflickorna, I could choose from halibut with apple sauce, shrimps with horseradish or curried mussel soup and then make a return ferry journey with a view of the sunset across the sea.

Once upon a time these fishing villages were very isolated and sparse but then around 200 years ago there was the equivalent of a fishy gold rush when whole shoals of herring virtually threw themselves into fishermen's nets. That harvest has much diminished but the herring fishing is still big at the village of Klädesholmen on the island of Tjörn.

This pretty cluster of clapperboard houses is home to nearly half of Sweden's herring fishing industry so it wasn't surprising that the evening's menu had six varieties of marinated herring, washed down with a choice of schnapps.

After consuming all that, it may not surprise you to learn that I woke up a couple of times in the night to find my hotel room rocking gently from side to side. It wasn't the influence of the herring chasers but the fact that this particular restaurant, Salt & Sill, boasts Sweden's first floating hotel on a pontoon alongside the dock in Klädesholmen harbour.

It seemed appropriate, staying in a floating hotel in this no-man's-land between land and sea. It was less intrusive, more at one with the surroundings, out among the flotillas of eider ducks and with the occasional passing kayaker to wave to.

I'm not sure that the fastest floating sauna in the world was completely in keeping with its surroundings, though. It's mounted on a catamaran hull tied up to the Salt & Sill jetty and, because I was there just after Sweden's huge midsummer party, it remained moored with the sauna skipper otherwise engaged.

So while I wasn't able to test its speed, I can vouch for its heat. Passing fishing boats could have assumed that the groaning was coming from the sauna's ropes straining at the jetty but I knew better.

A couple of them did eventually get the full benefit of a rarely sighted species in this neck of the woods - the iridescent, greater sweaty Englishman, all pink and purple in hue, as he came bursting out of the back of the sauna and threw himself into the briny blue.

THE KNOWLEDGE:
Simply Sweden (0845 890 0300/www.simplysweden.co.uk) offers a three-night package from £690pp (two sharing), B&B.

Price includes two nights at the Strandflickorna and one night at the Salt & Sill, return flights from Heathrow to Gothenburg with Scandinavian Airlines or from Manchester with City Airline and four-days car hire.

West Sweden Tourist Board: (dialling from the UK: 0046 3181 8300/www.westsweden.com).

Visit Sweden: 0207 108 6168/www.visitsweden.com