The Beginning

It all began in May 2020, when we decided to clean up our yard and demolish the old crooked shed.

The little house we bought in Laulasmaa few years earlier was getting ready to be moved in. While all the main construction on the house had been done by a small local company, all the work in the yard kept us busy. Right after the snow had melted and the ground was soft enough we uprooted some old overgrown bushes and gathered up all the junk laying around. The final part was the shed, which was used as a quick storage and for a while even as a outhouse equipped with modern mobile toilet, but now it was time to say goodbye to it all. Our neighbors, an elderly couple who are still quite active and work in their garden almost every day, were wondering why on earth do we want to get rid of the shed, where will we store our firewood or do we need this space for something even more important than the shed? They are old-school people and it was little bit hard to explain that we will not need firewood as our house is powered by electricity, at least for now, and if we ever needed a shed, for say a little fireplace, then we will revisit this issue. We were even joking that maybe we want to store a boat or something in this corner of the yard.

In this evening, just for fun, I visited the used vehicles portal to check out the prices of old sailboats and I was little bit surprised that the prices started around five thousand euros. I also remembered that our dear friend Janek had a little sailboat back in the day, there’s another fun story about the maiden voyage I made with him on that little boat.. ripped mainsail and everything…, but this was about ten years ago. I know that he was working on this project boat for few years, sailed to Finland few times and so on. I made a quick call to him to ask about used sailboats, what to buy and what not to buy, if at all… To my surprise the call ended with a proposal that we could take his boat for a testdrive for few months, as it was on the hard now and it was his belief that sailboats are made to sail, not to sit on the dock. Marlen was out for a sister-date at this time and before knowing my call to Janek, she started to talk about that it would be nice to live on aboard of a boat one summer… So it must have been fate and who are we to resist it.

A week later we had managed to book a temporary slip at a local Lohusalu marina. Janek and I sailed the 1968 20ft sailboat called Päevakoer from Pirita to Lohusalu. This trip included almost everything. Starting out as slow sailing with almost no wind and somewhere in the half way of our trip we sailed wing-on-wing with the spinnaker up doing an amazing speed of 3 knots. Then later on we were cought by the gust, the spinnaker was down at this time, the boat was heeled down, I was at the tiller and was near-panicking because it was a big surprise to me that the wind could change so quickly. I was not ready for it at all. Janek was laying on the opposite side of the cockpit practically laughing at me, saing that now we are sailing and that’s okay.

We had a very interesting summer this year. Although Päevakoer was in good shape for sailing, we still wanted to repair some little things like wooden window frames and replace the bolts that turned out to be not corrosion resistant. We even ended up with taking down the mast to replace the shrouds and raising the mast up again using our hands and a mainsail sheet. We did learn to sail at Lohusalu bay while we stayed there for one month. After that we had to move to Kakumäe for July and finally to Pirita for the rest of the summer. We felt pretty confident to go out on days with the wind up to 5-6m/s. One time we even tried to sail with bigger waves but turned back to harbour as this was clearly too far out from our comfortzone. There are lots of good things operating a boat this small but lack of the headroom in the cabin, a small deck and cockpit is not ideal for having some friends with us for a lovely afternoon sail. So we were sold on the idea of having our own boat.

There were some boats for sale locally. The ones with a good price went quick, one went literally right in front of our noses. In the end we started to look the Finnish and Swedish sites, until we found the 30ft sailboat from 1977/1978 in south Sweden. The boat was told to be in a fully working order. It had very basic instruments - a GPS plotter and a compass, some good sails and also the freeboard was painted cherry-red, not regular white. The price was very attractive and the seller was very accomodating even tough he would certainly had been more happy to deal with somebody face to face rather than answering our questions to figure out weather the boat is really ready to take a delivery captain and some crew on board to sail few hundred miles from Sweden to Estonia. It was a used boat and how could he quarantee anything. We found a very optimistic captain Tõnu who had lots of experience in delivering boats to Estonia and who accepted the job despite the virus breackout and possible quarantine time after visiting another country. We also looked at the option of landtransport but it was complicated due to the mast height/length.

After agreeing on the salesterms and finalizing the contract, we took out some cash in SEK, handed the papers and money to Tõnu. We also borrowed a tillerpilot from Janek. Then the most stressful time started as the autumn storms had began. While Tõnu was on his way, we had to deal with our neighbours tree that threatened to fall on our roof, and to think about sailing with those condition was not very calming. Tõnu had a helping hand for the few first legs of the journy back. As the storm got stonger and stronger they had to find shelter in a marina near Gotland for quite many days. The other man’s health could not withstand the weather and he had to fly back home before the long straight run from Gotland over to Hiiumaa. Under the Osmussaar Tõnu could finally eat and have some coffe as before that the seas were too high and he couldn’t trust his life for the hands of a temporary tillerpilot.

The wait was hard. As he called us at three o’clock in the moning and let us know that the boat is here and his wife had come take pick him up, we decided to talk more after he had had a chance to rest up… well then we could finally breath easily and sleep as well.

Tõnu kept us posted with some pictures and videos he made on the way and later on wrote a travel story for the Estonian boating magazine “Paat” in december 2020.