Amadea

Now let’s go straight to where and when it all started: April 2015, I meet this french guy at a party and he’s super cool, had just gotten this job at the Holmen Yachvaerft in Langoya, Asker and he’s super happy about it, and they need more people, so I might just come in right! I was coming from a few dry months with work, so I really needed a push up to my bank account savings, plus I love boats since... Forever, so I was just going for this opportunity!

Lucky chance, they call me back and I’m in for an interview, they like me and I start right off, cleaning boats like there was no tomorrow, and polishing them at all altitudes, and leaning down till laying right on the ground to paint the keel like there was no shame... Not really extremely exciting, but varied, outdoors, physical, could spend a chat with the boys and the schedule was pretty... Scandinavian!

So there I am now, rocking back and forth at 6:00 am on a bus full of students and other people working around the outskirts of Oslo, with Thomas, the french guy, and Nicolai, a danish guy, crazy connoisseur of Tom Waits, former boat builder in Copenhagen, sailor, later art director in an ad firm, then to Norway with his sweet wife to care for his their growing young family and so there with us on the bus. Thomas instead was working hard on odd jobs, in between rawdy partying, to save money and go to film school in Denmark where he is when I’m writing! Well done Thomas! We go to work, try and deal with our hardcore Norwegian fellowship and have a good time as well.

When the first rays of spring sun started to shine through the planks of the houses, I was walking around looking at boats in a casual 5 minutes break when I spot the boat depicted in my previous post... Amadea: beautiful, but looking terrible. My favourite kind of thing! She was stuck at the very end of the rail where boats where sitting in their cradles under the shelter of very big, high roofs, sitting there for years, a thick, dark layer of dust covering her deck and hull, with varnish peeling off everywhere and a very yellow tint... She hadn’t been cared for at all in years. I could hear her crying, and couldn’t resist! So I asked around and the same day I was inside her with Bjorn, the owner, and one of the boatbuilders at the yard, a very nice guy.

The boat that is now called Amadea was built in the late ‘60s in the Swedish boat-yard of Rosâttra and given the name of Skrållan. It’s built in mahogany, excluding the stern and fenders’ list which are made out of oak, and the lists that run along the edge of the deck which are made out of teak. The deck is mahogany plywood, a double 6 mm layer glued together that gives a fairly solid feel. The keel is made out of iron in accordance with the Koster rule and runs along most part of the length of the boat. In fact, if we compare Amadea with the Koster rule we see that it sticks to all 6 the points in it set. (cfr. http://www.laurinkoster.dk/Laurin__Wiki_/laurin__wiki_.html)

It’s worth noting the slender lines that the boat shows, the beautiful whale-back’ shape, rounded above the fenders’ list: a typical feature of koster boats and in particular of Laurin’s ones.

It’s also amazing that at 50 years of age Amadea still shows all the wood she’s made out of, no paint needed, no rot to hide, no dodgy patches or the like, no epoxy replacing wood bits or anything like it: all plain wood.

I’ve learned from the previous owner (which himself had the information from the previous owner) that Amadea went under restoration for the last time in 1991, which is when - I guess - they gave stain for the last time on the wood to make it darker and they replaced the benches’ pillows (or maybe just the covers).

In fact, as you can see from the pictures in the second post, Amadea’s wood was very yellow and patchy, a clear sign of our much loved star’s rays’ work on it over time; I had spotted a little rotten bit on the aft deck (by the stern post) while scraping varnish from hull and deck, the keel and hull were affected by some cracks that had opened between planks and that needed some tender, love and care (TLC) and the keel was very rusty... So she needed a full restoration on the outside, and that’s what I was going for!

I had bought it, I knew what the process would have involved, it was late spring, beginning of summer and the plan was that of dedicating to this operation from May to whenever it was necessary, but possibly before the end of July, because after then the værft would close and would have gotten me stuck on land for a whole month with no chance to take the boat in the water. I was doing the most part of the job on my own, and I knew it was going to be a full time job for the whole duration of the summer, possibly more, very unlikely any less. At the beginning I was hoping to get it done in one month, maybe two... This should tell the experienced reader something; I didn’t have a clue of what I was about to dive into, and that’s exactly how it was! My experience with sailing boat, after the Optimist’ sailing classes I took when I was about 12, was basically none, not to talk about varnishing and boat building in general. You might call me mad, and I did that too, very many times. Anyway, at the beginning of June I moved into the boat (on land) with all my gear, and got started with it very eagerly! I was really working 12 good hours a day, plus breaks, so as soon as I was up, and until it was time to go to bed, I was working on the boat, stopping only to keep hunger at bail and studying the boat carefully, assessing progresses and deciding further developments, and most important of it all: I was asking questions... Endless questions, many times to many different people - working for the værft or on their own boats at the værft - and many times the same question to the same person, to make sure I had understood everything, to double-check suggestion I wasn’t very happy with, and to make sure I had expressed myself properly with the others and they were telling me the whole story.

As a matter of fact I’m no carpenter, let alone a boat builder, nor a painter or a mechanic: I’m a philosopher and a photographer with a lot of different experiences and interests, I’m a maniac of “The Process”, struggling along the long road towards perfection while learning from repetition, and doing it with a rather autistic attitude! The triumph of here and now while something is being done: varnishing happens a stroke at the time, sanding a square inch at the time, every bit I take off the boat could generate a permanent mark on its wonderful body... This were my thoughts all the way along.

This blog is the story-telling of my adventure with the beautiful Amadea, the 28′ mahogany’ Laurin Koster that you’ll see in all the pictures, from the day I saw her till the last picture I’ve taken of her so far. She’s beautiful, and I love her! First of all let me make a bit of an introduction to the way we met.

It was early spring 2015, I used to live with six other folks in a house on the hills, and we weren’t going along great. I had had a few bad experiences with house-shares and I was getting frustrated and losing faith that there was some reasonable people at all to live with around me, so I was going for it: I love boats, I love the sea, I love travels, and I want to be ready and on the move as soon as possible. Join the dots and what you get is a boat! I’m also an environmentalist and a tight-ass, so it should be a sailing boat! In need for some cash in April I got a job at Holmen Yacht Værft of Asker, Norway (thanks Thomas! :) ) where I was helping getting the boats, there stored on land for the winter, ready for the next season, painting with antifouling the hulls and keels, cleaning them, sealing cracks in wooden boats and doing this sort of small simple jobs around the place. One day I was having a look around and I bumped into a wooden sailer, I knew it was approximately 27' or so, a line different from most other boats around, very nice, beautiful indeed, but covered in dust and with most of the varnish that was peeling off of the wood, a bit of a sad sight in some ways. It was in mahogany and the wood was all nice and yellow, denoting quite some years since the last coat of stain was given. I admired it for a while, inspecting it on board and finding it very interesting. After a few days I was talking to a carpenter in the yard (”værft” in Norwegian means “workshop”) and about my intention to buy a boat to live in, and he said he had one for sale! I knew he owns a 39′ Bavaria, but I didn’t know he was also the owner of the boat I had seen a few days before, and I was quite surprised to see him taking me exactly to that boat that I had spotted a few days before! We had a look together, he took me inside the boat and showed and told me about it and her situation.