Käsmu is known as the Captains' Village, and it has the proportions of a place that produced a lot of sailors for a small population. In the nineteenth century, this tiny settlement on a peninsula in Lahemaa trained and sent out so many ship's captains and mariners that a maritime school was founded here, and the old captains' houses still stand in neat rows along the shore, with tall roofs and carved porches. Today the village has fewer than a hundred permanent residents, and the old school building is part of the maritime museum, which tells the story of the village and its sailors.
The bay itself is one of the most beautiful on the coast, dotted with boulders that rise out of the shallow water like the backs of grey whales. Käsmu has an extraordinary number of erratics, huge stones left behind by the glaciers, and a walk along the shore brings you past dozens of them, some as big as houses. A path loops around the peninsula through pine woods and along the beach, and takes about an hour.
Its other claim to fame is smuggling. In the 1920s, when Finland had banned alcohol, the people of Käsmu loaded boats with spirits and sent them across the Gulf of Finland to the Finnish coast, a run of well under a hundred kilometres. The trade was dangerous but profitable, and many of the local houses were built with the proceeds. The Finns, not the Estonians, were the ones breaking the law, but the tale is told in the village with a certain pride, and there is a small exhibit about it in the museum.
The roads out here are narrow, quiet and partly gravel, running through pine forest and past old farmsteads. They are very easy to ride, with almost no traffic and a surface that is generally good, but loose stones appear on corners. Elk and deer cross the road at dawn and dusk, and the light in the forest is soft and green. A few guesthouses and a café in the village provide meals, with smoked fish and dark bread as the staples.
In the evening, with the sun setting behind the pines and the boulders glowing in the shallows, the village has the unhurried air of a place where nothing has needed to happen for a long time.