Sailing trips. Ilmatar arrived at her new home port in Helsinki from Lomma, Sweden, in November 2018. During the season of 2019, we sailed the Southern Baltic Sea and Kattegat and the archipelagos of Sweden and Finland. After that we had wished to set off for longer cruises, but due to the pandemic the plans had to be postponed.
Staying the season of 2020 in Finland, we sailed the Gulf of Bothnia up to Sea Lapland, cruised the Archipelago Sea including Åland Islands and finally visited the easternmost part of the Gulf of Finland close to the Russian border. In June, 2021 we were already on our way to the north of Norway, when new Corona restrictions stopped us in Denmark. After reconsidering our plan, we decided to first sail Danish and German waters of the North Sea, being later also allowed to visit Norway.
In the summer 2022, we were finally able to leave the Baltic Sea behind, presumably for many years. Making a long detour north, we first cruised the north of Norway before sailing south towards Spain and Portugal via Scotland and the west coast of Ireland.
Ilmatar stayed ashore over winter 2023 in Lagos. In the summer, we first cruised the Algarve and then made a two-month trip to the Azores, returning back to Lagos in September.
In the winter of 2024, we made a two-month cruise from the Algarve around Gibraltar to Costa del Sol and back. Later, in summer, we moved to the Eastern Mediterranean and cruised the Greek waters from the Ionian Archipelago via Crete to the Dodecanese. A new winter storage for Ilmatar was found in Leros.
Our plan is next to cruise the Greek archipelagos for at least one summer. At the same time, the memories of the Azores call as to return, sooner or later, to the wide open Atlantic…
The yacht. Ilmatar is a Nautor’s Swan 47, launched with the hull nr. 50 in 1980 in Pietarsaari, Finland. The boat type was designed by Olin Stephens of the Sparkman & Stephens Inc, New York, with totally 70 yachts built between 1975 and 1984. (As regards the life and career of the legendary boat designer, see his autobiography All This and Sailing, too.)
Olin’s brother and associate Rod Stephens worked on the design’s technical details in collaboration with Nautor. (For his enthusiastic interest in the construction, rig, and equipment of yachts, see the posthumously published manuscript on the web: Rod on Sailing: Lessons from the Sea.)
History. The boat’s first owner was the Austrian Franz “Moni” Eisl. He ordered the boat from Nautor just before his 60th birthday and gave her the name Happy Birthday. Situated in Porto Cervo, Sardinia, she sailed in the western Mediterranean. Moni Eisl, a two-time Olympic sailor and significant figure in his homeland’s sailing scene, won the world championship of the Dragon class in 1977. He also finished first with his new Happy Birthday in the first ever Swan World Cup in 1980.
As he hesitantly became ready to sell the boat due to his age in 2000, she was bought by the Frenchman Philippe Daudi living in southern Sweden. Renamed Farouche, after the nickname of Philippe’s wife, her home port changed to Lomma, not far from Malmö in the Sound.
Having just returned to Helsinki from a ten-week sailing trip to Scotland and Norway in September 2018, we noticed that this well-maintained Swan 47 was looking for new owners. During dark night watches we had been discussing the question of a bigger yacht suitable for long and challenging voyages. Things developed rapidly during a feverish month and it soon became clear the Swan would sail to Helsinki before winter.
The name. We wanted her a name which would remind us of our native waters in harbours far away. According to a tradition, it would have to be a three-syllable female name. We chose Ilmatar, originating from Finnish mythology. There Ilmatar, as the Maiden of the Air (ilma meaning “air” and the female suffix –tar designating goddess), gives birth to the world while she’s floating at sea. In the Finnish national epic Kalevala Ilmatar is described as follows:
Tuli suuri tuulen puuska,
iästä vihainen ilma;
meren kuohuille kohotti,
lainehille laikahutti.
Tuuli neittä tuuitteli,
aalto impeä ajeli
ympäri selän sinisen,
lakkipäien lainehien
Suddenly a storm wind blew,
Out of the east an angry blast
Blew the water to a foam
Heaving up the rollers high.
By the wind the maid was rocked,
On a wave the maid was driven
Round about the blue sea surface
By the whirling whitecaps lifted
translation by Eino Friberg
Homecoming. We departed Lomma in the Sound and entered the Baltic Sea late October, when the days are already short in these latitudes and the pale sun is shining low even at noon. There was not too much of sunshine for us as the weather soon turned nasty, and we had to familiarize ourselves with Ilmatar amid constant gales.
To our pleasure, she behaved beautifully in rough conditions like a real S&S. Sailing shorthanded, however, we chose to follow the east coast of Sweden up to the Åland Islands and continue then through the Archipelago Sea, instead of crossing the Baltic directly in the forecast Force 7 to 9 winds.
In the Stockholm archipelago it became freezing cold, +2˚ C in the day and -2˚ C at night, and one evening it began to snow. There was no proper heater installed yet to the boat, so we had to get along with a small portable gas heater you could not use when underway. In these waters, being underway required in any case greatest attention on deck, since we were sailing narrow fairways in the archipelago, and over one half of it in the dark.
The highlight of the trip, made possible by the northern route choice, was a visit to the Stormälö Marina, where we enjoyed having Ilmatar side by side with our old beloved Matilda Gustava. She is a 35 ft sloop, with which we had returned less than two months ago from Scotland and Norway.
On a rainy November night, having logged 660 nm since the Sound, we finally arrived at Helsinki. Ilmatar was happily back home in Finland after 38 years.
