The Draken - A Viking Ship

I was retired in 2012 from a huge sailing vessel. And I was retired for 14 lovely days in my summer house. And they called me from Norway and asked if I wanted to be a captain on a Viking ship. Of course I said no, I'm retired. But I'm still here. It sounded quite absurd when he said that they were going to sail across the Atlantic with this Viking ship. But then actually, a few months later, it was growing on me. At that time I bumped into Björn. What's going on with this Viking ship? Do you need a naval architect or something? And he was like, yeah, actually we do. I hate being cold and I'm very afraid of the ice. So I decided that I was definitely not ever going on this trip. But then my friend managed to convince me. I think he promised me lots of whales. We knew Leif Erikson came to Newfoundland several hundred years before Christopher Columbus. It's very, very interesting to do a real crossing with a sailing vessel, an open sailing vessel. And we are surprised how good the ship was handling the situation. Starboard here, and midships, and port. Good, we are on the way now. So try to go into the watch system now. Take a little rest, clean up, have good shape. The Draken is a reconstruction of a thousand years old Viking ship. So we have no comfort. We are sleeping in a tent. If you're looking for a luxury yacht, you've gone totally wrong. She is 35 meters long. The placement is 100 tons. She is quite big. Draken is an open ship. She has a deck in the sense that you can walk on it, kind of like a floor. But it's not a deck in the sense that it's watertight. You have to maneuver very carefully so you don't fill the ship. Three big waves going over the rail. She's going to go down. I think I was constantly afraid for the entire crossing. Maybe I wasn't expecting to die, but it definitely was a concern of mine. Getting swamped, having the ship filled with water one way or another, or hitting ice in the wrong way and therefore starting to leak, or going overboard. I would say those were the top three versions of dying on Draken. Why? That question I ask myself every day by the crossing. It's stupid. It's also dangerous. But it's also an interesting history to see how the Vikings could handle it. And they did that trip. The North Atlantic crossing was a lot of nature, a lot of ocean, a lot of life. I really wanted to sail up in the north. And I really wanted to sail to Greenland and Iceland. Places that in my mind were very far away, but they are really not. I mean, the world is really small. You think the ocean is big, but being out there, you see rubbish and you see ships. You see things caused by humans. Sitting on shore, you think it's vast, but it's not. The time I remember the most vividly from the crossing was the last night of the trip. I think at that point it's been about six weeks since we left Norway. We have this range for a helicopter, so we're going to be alone for a long time now. It's forbidden to hurt yourself now. We have to be very, very careful. I would say the entire crossing for sure was without a doubt the most extreme thing I've ever done on a ship. Or probably ever. You go up on Bow Watch around midnight and you just stand there and you're alone in the Labrador Sea and some gale. It's just like sea spray everywhere and cold and wild and dark. You're as profoundly exposed and alone as you can be. I work both as a sailor and a boat builder, but I also have this other career as an artist. Mostly working with graphic novels and illustrations. Sailing is very prominent in my artistic work. One of the things I do appreciate a lot about being at sea and working on boats is how that life is real in a way that drawing or being an artist is not. Of course they're both real, but it's not a matter of life and death that sailing is. Here's a short video of Gunilla, the ship I work on. Right now I'm cleaning up my cabin. This is my cabin here. Right now I'm on an island called Ökkerö outside of Gothenburg in Sweden. I'm currently working on a ship called Gunilla. Everyone on board Gunilla was supposed to be sailing the ship home right now. Then COVID hit, so everything is changing. She's up here on her yard period. This is coming up on the last week now, so everyone is scrambling to get everything put back together. Hi there, my name is Björn. You're not going to believe this, but I'm a captain, even if it looks like that. For the moment I'm stuck in Sweden, north of Stockholm, in my summer house. That's not too bad actually, but still I'm longing back to the sea. I miss sailing. I have a small sailing boat, but I miss my crew. We are 34 people that have gone through a lot of heavy weather and challenges, so I'm very fond of my crew. I'm a little bit self-isolated up here, but people are asking to come here for a week or two. Some of the crew is coming up to my summer house now and visit me and so on. It's a kind of small world also, the people who work with tall ships like this. But sometimes I think I destroy their life. They could get some other work instead for going on sailing vessels, but they do it, they love it. The university here where I work, there's normally 10,000 students. And now there's no students at all because they're not even allowed on campus. We're working with ship designs for novel ship types. And my PhD is focused on sailing cargo vessels. For the shipping industry, the main thing happening right now is the new rules for reducing CO2 emissions. The solution is right in front of our eyes to use wind power. So that's where sailing comes in. Actually, I don't feel trapped by COVID at all. This is a very normal situation to us, that you are on a ship and there's someone who decides, and then you do what they say. And you are with the people that happens to be around you, and you can't do anything about it. And this is like everyday life of a merchant mariner or a sailor. From working with Draken, I did learn a lot about sail trim and ship trim. And the balance between the sail and the hull. Since there's only one sail, and the ship is relatively small compared to the sail. It's very sensitive to shifts in the ballast or shifts in the center of gravity of the ship. She won't tack if it's wrong, and she won't fall off if it's wrong. It has to be perfectly balanced to sail well. It's very fascinating that the Vikings figured this out, actually, I think. The Vikings, they built their ships from bottom up. You lay your keel, and then you start building planks on the sides of the hull. This normally was done by an experienced boat builder. And he would just look at the lines of the ship and see if it looked correctly. And by each plank you add, of course, it has to have the right shape. It's really an art. They could actually build really well sailing ships that way. That could cross an Atlantic just by looking at the curves of the hull. Draken is a really good ocean-going vessel. She's a great sailor. Her bow is very full, so she lifts up on top of the waves. And it's almost like she's flying rather than sailing through them. It's beautiful. Sometimes people think it's easy with only one sail. But to tack and jibe and do all the manoeuvres and reef sail, it's very, very hard work. It takes all 34 people to hoist the sail and so on. It's one and a half ton you hoist. You can't do anything alone. It's too heavy. So you work together and help each other. That's the only way to do it. Some of the things in traditional craftsmanship and traditional sailing, there are skills that you learn on this type of vessel. It's not something that you get the chance to experience in many other places. Keeping some of these old ships and keeping some of this knowledge, it's a little bit like we say that we have to make sure that the rainforests are preserved because there are so many species there that we have not yet discovered. And if they die, there might be things that we never even knew we could use. And if we lose it, we might lose something that we could have use for someday. It's a special thing to work with this material like hemp and Stockholm tar and all old blocks and all craftsmanship and so on. It's different from going and polishing a plastic boat with some polish. You're going to love it. Even the smell. You smell good all the time of Stockholm tar. You can put something under your arms and you smell good. The ship is staying in Mystic Seaport in Connecticut. I'm very glad we are in a safe place, but I hope it will not affect next year because we want to come up to the U.S. West Coast or to Port Townshend and maybe join the race to Alaska. That's a dream for me.