Memory and Anticipation

A few years ago, after I had bought my sailing boat Inismara, which at the time was still called Schwaben, I met the widow of the boat’s first owner. The coastal cruiser had been built in 1966.

We immediately got along well, and during one of my visits to her home I saw the model of the boat standing in her living room. Built to a scale of 1:20, it included every imaginable detail — even a working tiller and a moving rudder.

I was completely captivated.

During my last visit, before she set off on her final journey into sailing waters unknown to us, she was determined to give me something that would always remind me of her.

Knowing how much she and her family cared about the model, I could not possibly bring myself to ask for it. Instead, she gave me a small silver bowl — and it does indeed remind me of the enthusiastic sailor she had been.

A few weeks ago, her son called me. The family was clearing out the apartment, he explained, and they had come to a decision: the model belonged with the real boat.

“When can I bring it over?” was all he asked.

For once, I was lost for words.

The model now has its place of honour beside my office. I built the bookcase two years ago, and looking at it now I have the strange feeling that perhaps, without knowing it, I had already designed it with the model in mind.

It fits perfectly.

Here in the North we have seven months of winter and five months of non-winter. For sailors, the calculation is even more dramatic: the boat spends four months in the water and eight months in the shed.

Which raises an obvious question: how do you keep the fascination of sailing alive through those long winter months, when lakes and rivers are frozen?

Whenever I walk past the model — which happens at least a dozen times a day — a sailing film begins to run in my head.

I remember the days and weeks aboard Inismara, the restoration work after buying a somewhat neglected boat, my voyage from the Schlei in northern Germany to Umeå in northern Sweden, Trysunda, and finally our arrival at BK Flottaren, at the uppermost navigable end of the Ångermanälven, where we have found our new home.

And no matter how long the winter lasts, there seems to be no limit to the anticipation of spring and another summer under sail.

Memory and anticipation.

Do not some of our most intense experiences take place in the mind?

For today, inspired greetings from the North. And yes — there is still another month of sailing season left, but everyone here is already talking about ice and snow…