Sunday, 7 October 2012
Wednesday, 3 October 2012
Tore Herlin and the Juni boats
Tore
Herlin is not as well known in this country as two of his creations, the tall
ships Gladan and Falken. While chief architect to the Swedish Navy he enjoyed a
parallel career as a designer of yachts and small boats inspired in large part
by his wish to encourage sail training at all levels. The little yacht Juni,
which I found in Stockholm in 2005 and brought back for restoration, is a
"Pojkbat" or young persons boat intended for this purpose.
The
original Juni was built about 1935 and resembled the Swedish Starboat, a design
that was adopted here with the addition of a counter for the Loch Long. She
proved to be very fast and seaworthy for her size with the result that numerous
copies followed, some in carvel mahogany and some clinker planked in oak. They
were taken up by boat-building schools as a conveniently small project, so that
the design was used to teach building skills, resulting in a boat which teaches
sailing. My Juni was built in 1973 to the order of Sonja Herlin, Tore's
daughter, to replace the original boat after she was destroyed in a fire.
I
didn't know all this when I first saw Juni looking rather dejected in a garden
in Dalaro. It was obvious that she needed a lot of work, but the quality of her
original build shone through, crying out for restoration.
The
story of her return to Scotland is one of the first posts on this blog and can be read here An Expedition to Stockholm. Only once she was
safely here in Argyll was it possible to remove the furniture and floorboards
to get a proper look at what needed to be done. This also gave me a proper
understanding of the quality of the work done by the Storrebro School. The hull
is of close-seam construction, that is to say there is no caulking or stopping
between the planks. She has swept decks in teak, also a masterwork in small
scale. Varnished mahogany topsides meant that any mistakes would be highly
visible. The project was going to be more challenging than one on a larger
scale.
Any
restoration will take a lot of time and throw up problems that have not been
met with before. A good way to proceed is to start with the routine but
time-consuming jobs, removing old paint and varnish and so on, while
researching the more difficult and novel tasks. The former work will have to be
done anyway and the time involved mindlessly scraping and sanding gives one
plenty of time to think and plan.
I won't
bore the reader with all the details of what was done. The topsides, spars and
internal furniture were all stripped down, to be refinished with oil and
traditional varnish, the work producing plenty of thinking time. The difficult
work involved dealing with two major structural cracks in the hull planking,
combined with numerous associated broken frames. I was a bit worried in case
this damage had occurred through normal sailing but it seemed more likely to
have happened on shore, as Swedish clubs usually operate their own storage
facilities and accidents do happen. Subsequently some discreet enquiries
suggested that this was probably the cause, which was reassuring.
Juni
was relaunched in June 2012 and there followed a couple of weeks of anxious
pumping while she took up after about ten years ashore. She has proved to be a
lively little seaboat, behaving in some ways like a much larger yacht but also
very fast and responsive. She'll be ideal for day-sailing around the sheltered
sea-lochs of mid-Argyll.
Labels:
argyll,
classic yacht design,
daysailer,
Juni,
scotland,
Swedish yachts,
Tore Herlin
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