However, these gatherings do not only consist of the materials and designs of a particular age. Actually using the boats calls for much more detailed replication. On the minute level, tacking moves and manoeuvres with these clumsy vernacular hulls and rigs differ from those of modern yachting. Furthermore, special events imitate or reconstruct particular routes like the mail-carriage between Finland and Sweden, the summer journeys for following stocks of Baltic herring, or journeys to and from markets and cities. The enacting of particular uses and of particular routes results in apparent authenticity.
Vintage Glamour
Aestheticized racing yachts represent another class of objects around which many practitioners orbit and perform acts of wooden boating. This genre builds on the glamour of sailing as a sport and on the celebrities who feature in the narrative of boat histories. Story-telling, aesthetic judgement and visually representing boats are key skills in this field. What results is a view that the core objects of this practice are unique, priceless and prestigious. Accordingly, boat-classes such as the International Rule boats and the square-metre boats receive much publicity, despite the fact that they are now few in number.
Races are the sites in which these boats perform their role in staging human passion to compete and excel. Ironically, the priceless objects are exposed to the hardship of racing: collisions, stress and strain. The racing context implies a merger between outdated and new technology. In the time of their design, commissioning and building, these boats involved and required the most advanced designs and best available technology. In the same vein, their life as competitive boats on the race course was short. This genre of wooden boating now merges dated technological advances with new innovations. Hence, boats with old-fashioned hulls receive modern rigs, and are operated and trimmed with the aid of advanced carbon-fibre technologies of Spectra and Dynema. The combination of dated high-tech and contemporary high-tech presents endless very concrete problems for the practitioners. These may be solved by simple statements like ‘above the deck everything is modern but below the deck we aim for originality’. Responding to these and similar dilemmas also calls for and enables one to practise and demonstrate the more sophisticated skills of a restoration professional. As a boat-owner and a museum-chief explains: ‘Converting a canvas deck to a teak deck is perhaps a matter of maintenance. But is it a good enough reason to alter the weight balance and radically change the overall appearance of the yacht? The pious yacht-owner of course chooses to stay with the original solution’ (Nordlund, 2004, translation from Swedish by the author).
The race yachts warp and condense time in another sense as well. These vintage boats cut through decades not only in terms of technological advances, but also in terms of social reality. It is very common for boat-owners to collect and publish the list of previous owners, and to catalogue the races and other gatherings in which the boat has been involved. Such boat-histories connect present and previous owners of the same yachts. While this is for many just a matter of documenting the history of the boat, it is also one particular way through which boats gather momentum and establish themselves as distinctive and special. For example, the sixtieth-anniversary publication of a 6 metre yacht called Maybe IV written in the early twenty-first century elaborates in detail on the acquaintances of the person who commissioned the boat in pre-Second World War Scandinavia, thereby establishing the uniqueness of this particular vessel and its owners.
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• Mikko Jalas