Gunnarstenarna

The best places to catch Baltic herring are most likely the isolated outer archipelagoes. Before we had fishing boats with engines people were dependant on places to stay close to the fishing banks during the fishing season, away from home. This is how the seasonal fishing villages came about. Islands with good anchorages and suitable for building small shacks or simple boathouses.

Gunnarstenarna is the place where we find the clearest and most numerous artifacts from this lucrative and dangerous business.

In the county of Nynäshamn seasonal fishing villages have existed at Landsort, Södra Viksten, Gunnarstenarna and Bodskär. At Landsort and Gunnarstenarna, the citizens of Trosa had royal privileges to fish during the seasons (May-June and August-September. According to Axel Quist (1930) there used to be 10 boats from Trosa and 6 boats from Ösmo or the rest of the countryside in the 19th century.

Particularly Norrskär at Gunnarstenarna have numerous signs of old activity like foundations and boat launching arrangements. Seasonal fishing continued into the 1870s.

Calculations by Bertil Hedenstierna give us the astonishing number of between 1000 and 1500 fishermen with over 100 boats during the season at these isolated skerries. In addition the fishermen had wifes and hands to help with the processing of the catches. Life must have been very hectic on the skerries in the old days.