There are no coincidences– Part II


After she had spent 74 years lying on the seabed in view of his home, Bo Eriksson is into the hard yards of returning his beautiful 1901 Gunnar Mellgren design Ester to race condition while keeping her heart and soul intact… Dan Houston reports


At last year’s Fife regatta on the Clyde there was a rare event. I know, I know; you’re going: ‘How rare is rare? The Fife regatta itself is “rare” – it only happens every five years and before last year there hadn’t been one since 2013.’ And, yes, you also have to have a boat, a Fife design, that’s probably going to be at least 100 years old, and sail her or trail her all the way to Scotland… for a week. But classic sailors are crazy: they’d crawl naked across a boatyard, dragging a bag of spanners attached to their nuts with piano wire just to sniff each other’s varnish. And come to think of it (I don’t), maybe it is just the men… But this little event, rare even within


rare, was with the softly spoken Fife owner Bo Eriksson, who was doing a talk upstairs at the Largs Sailing Club about his rescue of another rare boat – Ester, which had lain lost on the seabed in a bay near his home for 74 years. There were perhaps 20 people in the


room and Bo was explaining how this boat, a skimming dish from 1901, had been timed doing an average speed of 17kt over a three-mile course. He had no doubt that


38 SEAHORSE


given the right conditions she’d do 20kt. Bo’s credentials are well known in this


select circle. He is best known as the owner of Magda IV, his 1904 53ft (15.2m) Fife yacht which he brought from Sweden to sail at the first Fife regatta in 1998. At that event he had sailed north in company with Eric Tabarly having first joined the French sailing hero who was celebrating the 100th anniversary of his own 1898 Fife rater, Pen Duick, in Brittany. Tragically, after a night’s stopover in Newlyn, the friendly Magda and Pen Duick crews lost sight of each other as next day the French boat sailed over the horizon ahead and later that night Eric was lost overboard while dowsing sail sailing downwind in rising seas. Tabarly had drowned, and his body was


only recovered several weeks later. But his legacy lives on in his later boat, Pen Duick VI, being skippered last year on a visit to the regatta at Largs by his daughter Marie, who has just started The Ocean Globe Race in her as I write. The Fife sailors love their old boats, not


just for their lissom looks, but also their long-keel seaworthiness; that sense of suspension and speed when you sail them. They like the way they can occasionally surprise more modern sailors; at one of these Fife regattas, sailing a similar-length boat, we overtook Drum, Ron Holland’s Maxi design, with her crew looking in the water to see if they were towing a bucket. This talk was getting a spanner out of that bag and throwing it in the works.


Here was a boat that was looking like a time machine. Her keel was fin-and-bulb, she was extremely light, weighing just 3.7 tons despite being 50ft long… and where was her waterline – at 29ft it was mostly lost under the shelf of her topsides. But she was also made of varnished


wood, albeit super-thin planks laid over a basket of lightweight metal and wooden ribs. She was fastened with hollow rivets, like an aeroplane… but hang on – she came from a time before flight. It was fascinating to see how Ester’s


story affected the little audience; how something so modern had come from so long ago, had been so lost – totally forgot- ten, and yet now was once more brought into being. Old boats are a great example of the sometimes startling surprise of living history; no amount of looking at old books can recreate the sensation of seeing them afloat and sailing on the water. Bo can talk about the lightning-bolt


effect of discovering that Ester, a boat of the south, was sunk in a bay near where he lives in Sweden’s Baltic far north. As we related in these pages last month, he’d read about her in the late 1980s, and he and his friend Per’s obsession led them to eventu- ally finding her in 2012. From her watery grave the boat seemed to speak to him. It was as though she needed to be found, surfaced and restored. For though boats like her were once the


talk of many a sailing club bar, and some heated discussion in the specialist press,


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