Stockholm:
Icebreakers freed dozens of ships from thick ice in the Baltic Sea, officials said on Friday, ending the ordeal of thousands of passengers stranded in freezing conditions off the Swedish coast.
"There are no more ships stuck in the ice," Ann Ericsson of the Swedish Maritime Administration's ice breaker unit, told AFP.
A number of vessels, including several passenger ferries shuttling as many as 1,000 passengers each between Sweden, Finland and Estonia, became stuck Thursday just outside the Stockholm archipelago, where freezing winds had pushed thick ice towards the coast.
"We have not slept much," Lena, a passenger on the ferry Amorella that broke free from the ice early Friday, told Swedish public radio.
"We've been interested in watching all the ice breakers and helicopters work."
Two ice breakers failed to free the Amorella and several other ferries yesterday, forcing them to wait for the larger Ymer ice breaker to sail down from the Bay of Bothnia in the north.
There it had been working to free as many as 50 cargo ships and commercial vessels, some of which had been stuck for days and in one case since last Saturday, according to the maritime administration.