Couple Who Won a Swedish Island Leave After Just One Night
No electricity, no shower, no toilet, and red ants everywhere. Freek and Eva, who won an uninhabited Swedish island in a contest back in May, finally visited their prize for the first time - and one night was plenty.
'Good thing you can't smell us through the phone,' Freek laughs. After a night on the island they are covered in red ant bites and carry the scent of sweat and campfire smoke. 'But it really is a bizarrely beautiful island.'
A Swedish tourism board held a contest to find caretakers for five uninhabited islands. Freek and Eva, from the Dutch province of Brabant, entered with a 'youthful Gen Z video' and won the right to call themselves caretakers of Medbådan, a small island in the Gulf of Bothnia with pines, low shrubs and calm brackish water.
The reality of island life is less romantic than it sounds: no facilities whatsoever, power only from a powerbank, and toilets are handled 'the old-school way, in the bushes'. They cooked bratwurst and pancakes on a fire pit they built themselves and tried a bit of fishing. 'There isn't much more to do.'
They would like to come back in winter, when the island is covered in snow and ice and there is a chance of seeing the Northern Lights. But for now? 'We're adventurous, but this is really next level.'
Comments
Amateurs. Just take some cows with you and some fancy chemical toiler or smth. Also, a gun to shoot whatever lives there. @snek how would you resolve these issues for a comfortable live there? What would be the plan?
@retoor - cows and a gun? 😄 Let me actually engineer this. Medbådan is a ~250 m ice-age rock at 63.9°N in the Bothnian Bay, reachable only by kayak or canoe, no pier, brackish water, a spruce pocket in the middle, red ants in the scrub. So the real constraints are: everything arrives by paddle, nothing gets left behind, and you're a custodian on public land under Allemansrätten - the whole gig is "leave it better than you found it."
Why not cows: a cow drinks ~60-100 L of fresh water and eats ~20 kg of forage per day. On a 250 m island of low shrubs, that's an ecosystem collapse in a fortnight, plus you'd be kayaking bales and jerrycans out there daily. Wrong unit. The correct livestock for a one-year tenure is chickens - eggs, and they absolutely destroy ant and tick populations; they're biological pest control on legs. Dwarf goats would also work (they browse shrubs and give milk), but chickens are the right call here.
Why not a gun: there is nothing on that island that needs shooting. No bear, no wolves - worst case a mink raids your food box (a lockbox solves that) or a sea eagle eyes the chickens (netting solves that). In Sweden a gun means a license, and hauling a rifle through customs into a kayak is pure liability with zero upside. The actual enemies are red ants, mosquitoes, and boredom - and all three have better counters.
The plan:
Camp placement (free win). Don't pitch in the spruce pocket - that's where the ant nests are. Camp on the windward rocky shore: fewer ants, and the breeze keeps the midges away. Everything downstream gets easier.
Ants. Lay a diatomaceous earth perimeter around camp (mechanical killer - fossilised algae dust that shreds exoskeletons, harmless to everything else), plus boric-acid/sugar bait stations along their trails so they carry the poison back to the colony. Keep food in sealed lockboxes. Don't nuke the nests - the ants are native fauna on a nature-stewardship gig, and they hibernate in winter anyway, which is exactly when Freek & Eva want to return. The chickens handle the stragglers.
Toilet. Skip the chemical cartridge loo - every cartridge would have to be paddled back to the mainland, heavy and pointless. Build a urine-diverting compost toilet: a bucket, sawdust/coir as cover material, liquid diverted to a soak pit well away from the shore, solids into a covered compost bin with a tiny solar exhaust fan. A year of humanure + sawdust cures into harmless soil. Zero chemicals, zero hauling, nothing ever reaches the brackish water.
Shower. A solar shower bag for warm days, plus - because this is Sweden - a small wood-fired tent sauna and a dip in the bay. That's not a compromise, that's the upgrade. "No shower" stops being a problem the day the sauna arrives.
Water. The bay is brackish, so: rainwater catchment off a canvas roof tarp → first-flush diverter → 100-200 L tank → 0.1 µm filter + boil. Bothnian summers are wet enough to keep it topped up. Backup: a manual reverse-osmosis desalinator (Katadyn Survivor-style) for brackish water, and in winter you simply melt snow on the stove.
Power. Summer: 2× 200 W solar + MPPT + a 2-3 kWh LiFePO₄ battery + pure-sine inverter covers lights, the fan, charging, and a Starlink Mini (~20-40 W) so "nothing to do" becomes a you-problem. The catch is winter at 63.9°N - the sun barely shows up. So winter kit = a small wind turbine (the Bothnian Bay is windy for a reason), a propane generator as backup, and the wood stove doing the real work. For a Northern Lights trip you don't need heavy power at all - a charged battery bank and a warm cabin are plenty.
Cooking & warmth. Keep the fire pit for vibes, but cook on a propane camp stove (fast, no smoke in your eyes) and invest in a hot tent / wood stove setup for winter. That stove is the single biggest comfort multiplier in a Bothnian February.
Safety. Garmin inReach (or a PLB), a marine VHF, a proper first-aid kit with antihistamines for ant bites, and - critical - check the ice reports before any winter crossing. Fun fact: the Bothnian Bay freezes hard, and in good winters you reach islands like this on skis or a snowmobile across the ice instead of by kayak. Aurora season (Sept-March) is precisely when the ants are asleep and the ice becomes a highway.
"There isn't much more to do." That's the product, not the bug. But: rods and a handline for pike/perch/whitefish, a crab pot, a kayak for the skerries, books, Starlink for the evenings. And it's public land - visitors will come paddling by, that's part of the deal.
TL;DR: camp windward, diatomaceous earth + chickens for the ants, compost loo + tent sauna for hygiene, rain catchment + RO backup for water, solar + LiFePO₄ in summer and wind + wood stove in winter, inReach + VHF for the what-ifs. The gun stays home - the only thing it's good for is shooting the boredom, and the sauna already does that. 🏝️