A little open boat motors into the island's small harbour. In it sits a blond and sun-tanned youth.

"I think that's him." Leila says. He cuts the engine and his boat glides gently towards a low pier. It is 6.30 pm, we are on an island in the Baltic and there is a good five hours of light left in this long summer day. Plenty of time. This is Jurmo and, among the hundreds of thousands that make up the Finnish Archipelago, it's one of the few islands large enough to support a small community. I am here on holiday, a guest of my girlfriend and her mother (possessed of a small summer cottage and a place in Jurmo's heritage). I never imagined that climbing of any nature was even conceivable here.

The young fellow, Anton Johansson, drew up against the pier and got out of the boat. Like my girlfriend he can trace his ancestry back through hundreds of years on this island, it is likely that he and Leila are third cousins. Against all probability he is a climber and today he is our guide. Anton is a good climber. Good enough, in fact, to have earned a light sponsorship from Five-Ten. Most of the year he is on the Finnish mainland, going to school in Helsinki and climbing in places like Koivusaari and Meilahti. Come summer he joins his family on Jurmo to holiday for weeks at a stretch. One's first impression of this part of the Archipelago is a realization of just how flat things are here. The islands are mere blisters of granite barely breaking the skin of an eternally calm sea. One would think that summers spent here would be anathema for a climber, particularly when Finnish summers are often measured in mere weeks. There can't be any climbing out here. Can there? I didn't think so. Jurmo's tallest feature, Högberg (literally "high mountain") is less than a hundred feet above sea level and in no way precipitous.

Well, to begin with we wouldn't be climbing on Jurmo. We were headed for a tiny sister island, less than a half mile away, called Huvudskär. It takes only a few minutes to get there in Anton's boat, we pull it up onto the rocks and look around. Here, somewhere around ten thousand years ago, the last of a series of giant ice age glaciers began its retreat after advancing as far south as Germany. Behind it was left an ocean twice as large as the Baltic is today and there was no Finnish Archipelago. With the unimaginable pressures of miles-thick ice sheets removed the bedrock started to bounce back. Eventually what is today southern Finland lifted enough to rise, in a sort of reverse Atlantis, out of the sea. The thousands of granite islands and islets of the Archipelago also emerged and they continue to rise at the rate of about a sixth of an inch every year. Many are just smooth lumps of flattened granite, but lots and lots of them are littered with ancient glacial debris. Boulders, millions of them.

Anton is (of course) a boulderer and in the middle of the Baltic he has found a sort of heaven. In summer the days are long, really long, during the weeks around midsummer it just doesn't get dark. You could literally climb around the clock. There are so many boulders littering these islands that you would never run out of new problems. Best of all, the finest routes would never be crowded, ever. There is nobody out here, and on an island like Huvudskär even Jurmo year-rounders rarely set foot. Unlike Anton, they see nothing worth the trip. If he so desired Anton could have all of this to himself forever.

The weather today is nothing short of perfect, the sky is blue, clouds fringe the horizon and the sun is halfway through one of the longest afternoons in the world. Anton said earlier that he wanted to wait until now because the day was a bit hot. Ha! Someone should take him to Joshua Tree this time of year. We scramble up onto the island for a minute and Anton points to a boulder nestled in a slightly shaded fold. At its base there is a shallow marsh netted over with juniper and cloudberry bushes. He tosses his crashpad on top of the springy green and stands on it under a small overhanging face. "A one move wonder, but maybe still cool." he says inspecting a thin crack and pulling out his toothbrush to clean up a low sloper. I ask him about how the Finnish grade climbs. Anton tells me that they use the Fontainebleau system, but he isn't into the numbers. "Having fun is more important."

He ducks around on top of the rock and cleans a final sloper. Back at the base he inserts the fingers of his right hand into the crack, his left hand thumb presses down onto a tiny and distant shelf, feet are placed and then he just smoothly pushes up to take the top sloper at full stretch with his left hand. Anton is correct, it's a one move wonder. An easy pull and he's on top. "Do you want a go?" he offers.

Ok. So I fight my way into the tightest shoes in the universe and then balance onto the crashpad. Quickly I discover that the crux is just getting on. Anton made it look so easy too. After floundering about I almost get my feet to stick but come off before making even a single move, to top it off my right foot misses the pad and squelches into the watery mud underneath. Not exactly how I wanted things to go. We move on. Anton leads us on a brief treck, rock-hopping across the island, to some of his favourite spots. I concentrate on getting good photos while he works the routes. His friendly enthusiasm eventually gets me to scamper up one or two of the easier lines. All but one of the problems are nameless, all are numberless. The one named route ("mean bitch") was christened by a friend of Anton's who scored a massive bleeding flapper pulling on a razor-sharp edge.

Anton has been climbing for about five years, he started serious island bouldering about three years ago. Some of the hardest problems here are only now coming to realisation. He showed us a highball that he's developing, it's fearsomely thin and has a truly nasty base. He should buy another crashpad, and maybe a parachute. At about 10.30pm, a full hour before sunset, Anton kindly took us back to Jurmo. On the way he told us of other islands, with bigger and better lines than on Huvudskär. In a couple of weeks some of his friends will join him and they will climb there.

Anton ... maybe you should keep this a secret.