It’s late May in Sweden, the sun is shining, and boats are launching. Sweden, with its thousands of miles of spectacular coastline and DIY culture, has a wonderful—and wonderfully unpretentious—sailing scene. Mia and I have a Norlin 34 called Spica that we keep 20 minutes from our house, and when we’re not out sailing for work on Falken or Isbjørn, we’re messing around on Spica (according to Axel, our 4-year-old son, it’s “his boat”).
Like most sports and social activities in Sweden, the sailing scene here is based around club culture. Every small town with water access will have a local boating club, for sail and power alike, with dock facilities, a small boatyard, maybe a grill or two, often a sauna, usually trampolines and sandboxes for the kids (plus Optis of course), and most intriguingly, their own cranes, tractors, and volunteer work force. All of this is amazingly well-priced—our club in Enköping, a 40-minute train ride from Stockholm, costs about $60 per year for membership, plus a small fee if you rent an in-water slip. Each year Mia or I are expected to contribute about 18 hours of labor to help maintain the club’s facilities, launch and haul boats, work a night-watch shift, and other jobs.
For this nominal cost, we get access to these great facilities and an extremely efficient membership group, especially when it comes time to launch. Volunteers from the club have been trained to use the crane, operated with a big RC-style remote control, to help launch boats all day long on the weekends. Last weekend we booked our time to use the fixed, 10-ton, electric crane to launch Spica.
As it’s a fixed crane and not a Travelift, all the boats must be on moveable cradles. Most, including Spica’s, are simple, modified truck chassis fitted with jack stands welded onto the frame and a long tongue/trailer hitch fitting that the club’s tractors can hook up to. We paid $19,000 for the cradle and the shed, bought from an older club member whose sailing days were behind him, and which sits on the club’s boatyard property right in town.
The club members were so efficient this year that they were ready to launch Spica before Spica was ready to be launched. I was in the shed cleaning the last bits off the bottom paint and sorting out lines and fenders when the tractor parked outside the doors ready to hook us up. Spica, despite her mere 34 feet, draws some 6 feet, and she sits high on the cradle, clearing the shed doors by about a centimeter. The tractor parked Spica next to the crane, and the club volunteers rigged up the slings and silently swung the boat out over the bulkhead and into the water. I jumped below to check for leaks or open seacocks. After two years ashore (we’ve had a busy couple of summers), Spica floated!
The next job was rigging the mast. Everyone de-rigs here over the winter, partly because the design of the crane doesn’t allow for lifting boats with their masts in, and also because it’s just so easy. Around the corner from the boat crane is the mast crane, also electrically operated from a remote control, on the bulkhead next to the racks where masts are stored for the winter.
A few days after launch, Mia and I returned to the boatyard to pull Spica’s mast off the rack and start rigging her. It’s a wonderful thing having the boat only 20 minutes from home—I can work as long as I feel like it, then just go home when I’m frustrated or tired. There’s no rush. I spent two or three days sorting out the mast and all her rigging. Everything had to be right, as I’m racing Spica in the 350-mile Gotland Runt in the Baltic just after midsummer, the classic offshore race here in Scandinavia, for which the boat was specifically built back in the ’70s.
When the rig was ready, a couple of friends came down on a weekend when the crane was available and up she went. My time in the late 2000s working as a rigger in Annapolis definitely helped—no matter how many times we use these DIY cranes here, it always feels sketchy. But all went smoothly, and Spica is a sailboat again.
As I write this, I’m prepping to go down to the boat this afternoon to bend on the sails, and this weekend we’re hoping to take Axel out for the season’s first shakedown sail, planning to spend the night on the hook and enjoy the midnight sun.
People wonder why we need our own boat when we spend most of our waking hours thinking, talking, and planning sailing for 59º North. But living in a culture where sailing is so accessible, so affordable, and the cruising so beautiful and easy, it feels kinda stupid not to. Wouldn’t it be great if this much affordable accessibility to boats and the water were everywhere?
August/September 2024
