The 1901 rocketyacht Ester – the so-called mini Vasa rescued from the deep in 2015 by Bo Eriksson and friend Per Helgren, has launched after a four year restoration and started some sailing trials at Örnsköldsvik in Sweden’s High Coast, in the northern Baltic. Here in a first film of her sailing by Leif Wikberg Bo and skipper Laurance Diane Ramès, describe the feel of the boat, which sank in the late 1930s and lay hidden 164ft (50m) deep in the Baltic before she was discovered… See CS report from 2015 below.
See more of coming out of the shed (no sound): HERE
Classic Sailor report from October 2015
Ester was discovered sitting upright 164ft (50m) below sea level
On Sweden’s High Coast, one of the nation’s fastest racing yachts of the early 20th century has been brought back to the surface from the dark Baltic mud where she has lain in forgotten obscurity for more than 70 years, writes Dan Houston.
The Gunnar Mellgren skimming dish design Ester is in surprisingly good condition. Divers made a cradle for her and raised her in the same way that they raised the Vasa and the Mary Rose. They blasted the mud away from around the wreck with air hoses before fitting a web of strops and ropes around her frame and bringing her up from her 164ft (50m) deep watery grave.
After six years it’s a moment to savour, Bo, left with one of the divers
For Bo Ericksson and friend Per Hellgren it was a moment to savour. For the last six years they have been raising money to raise this famous piece of Swedish yachting history after Per found her on the bottom in 2011. But unlike the Vasa or the Mary Rose, their aim is to restore the racer to sail – and not only that, but to race!
Ester had a legendary racing career lasting 15 years from when she was launched in 1901. She was specially commissioned and built to defend Swedish honour against the Finnish competition for the Tivoli Cup. Her debut on the racing circuit was quite explosive with writers admiring her lines as well as her performance. She was a radical dishy shape, with a slim fin keel, influenced perhaps by the lightweight racing designs of the English designers Charles Sibbick or Linton Hope. In one of her early seasons she took 29 straight wins in those hotly contested years of yachting before the Great War.
Ester is brought to the surface in the high Baltic
She disappeared after that war but was later renamed as Britta and the name of Ester passed into yachting legend.
Radical lines and keel profile show how fast she can sail
Then one dark night in the late 1930s while she was being sailed north from Trysunda there was a reported fire onboard and the yacht sank. The crew abandoned to a dinghy, but the whereabouts of Ester were lost. It was decades later, when Per Helgren was researching yachting history, that he came across the story and began to dig for Ester’s past, and to try to find out what happened to her. He eventually deduced the area in which she had sunk, and the search came out of the library and onto the water.
Back in the moment of her raising Bo and Per are nervous about whether the precious 114- year-old hull will break with the strain of lifting. She is full of five tons of mud which has to be removed. But all went well and it seemed as if Ester was happy to be in the light again.
Then they discover something strange… a year earlier they had brought up the gaff from where it had been lying on the deck all those dark decades. And as it broke the surface, a half of the gaff jaws had broken off and fallen into the sea. Amazingly that half gaff jaw is found on the deck of Ester as she is brought to the surface. Waterlogged, it had sunk all the way down through the water, to land back on her deck in the deep. It’s an auspicious moment. And now, at Örnsköldsvik high up in the Swedish Baltic the work of restoring Ester begins.
More on her restoration: HERE
Ester will now sail in the Mediterranean classic regattas – and have a chance to wow the crowds again
Ester in the shed where she spent four winters being restored
