W ords: M ark Jack
A
s a long-term lover of wooden vessels, earlier this year I decided the time had come to replace our rather tired Sonata moored at Middle Island with a more elegant traditional wooden vessel, even if this would be somewhat less practical.
Feature | Vågspel – A letter from one owner to another
I was intent on identifying a traditional vessel with a relatively large cockpit which would be suitable for family day sailing and which would fit in a shipping container. I decided on the Scandinavian Folkboat design which I had long admired, and set about trying to purchase a vessel in Sweden through our associated container terminal CTF in Stockholm.
Vågspel
Torbjörn Persson, Operations Director, managed to secure Vågspel for us, in simply stunning condition for a largely un-restored 59-year-old vessel. She had been owned by one family from new, and their account of the history of this much-loved vessel, shipped with albums of photos and much personal material, was so moving that I thought other members would be interested in the story...
A letter from one owner to another
W ords: Ellinor H jertsson
t really feels like a fairytale with a happy-everafter ending! Though I feel a bit sad to be separated from something that has been a part of my life, there is a time for everything. A boat should be used and we haven’t used her for the last couple of years. But I am happy to leave her to you; a family who will use her, continue to take care of her and which has an interest in her history and as you wrote ‘she will be cared for in the tradition of your family’. This makes me very happy. In 1929 when my father, Gösta Hjertsson, was 14 years old, he joined the Swedish navy and spent the first three years sailing as a ‘cabin boy’ – a young man in training to become a sailor. He mostly sailed training ships such as the fully-rigged ship HMS af Chapman. Every year they made longer trips, and in 1931 my father sailed to Madeira and the USA. He continued working for the navy for six more years, mostly on board destroyers. In the navy he got trained as a coppersmith and became a specialist in soldering, which he later trained others in. After these nine years in the navy, he went ashore and started working as a civilian for the Swedish military with technical surveillance of radar equipment. He also constructed waveguides for radars which he put together at different military areas in the archipelago around the Swedish coast. I remember as a child that when he travelled to these areas, we the family weren’t allowed to know where he was working.
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| DECEMBER 2013 AHOY!
Whilst my parents always had a sailing boat, a cruiser, they dreamed of a larger boat. My father was a very careful man who never took any risks; he was very handy and thought of a lot of practical details for such a boat – a boat that would become known as Vågspel. There was a lot of correspondence between the boatyard and my father and a lot of changes were made until at last Vågspel was delivered during the fall of 1954 at Pålnäsviken, Saltsjöbaden. On 3 August 1954, she was registered with the Swedish Sailing Federation under the number S 415 and her class certificate was awarded on 29 September that same year.
Her delivery by train all the way to the bay where she remained until 2013 was a big event and 59 years later, the transportation of Vågspel in a container to Hong Kong is as big of an event in the marina as it was then. She was given the name Vågspel because of its two meanings in Swedish – it’s not easy to translate this but I will give it a try. When you hear Vågspel the first thing you think of is when the sound of the waves plays against the outside of the boat. The other is that it was an economic adventure for my parents when they ordered her because they couldn’t really afford her.