Dreams come true!

Ever since I got to boats I’ve dreamed of owning Laurinkoster. I think it’s because of the powerful appearance these small (in today’s terms) sailboats have.

The original design drawn by Arvid Laurin was for “Monsun” which was designed for Atlantic sailing. She was built with oak-on-oak, heavily framed, no deck-house but instead the deck was rised on curved “valdeck” to give sailors more habitable interior. These valdeck gave the hull a look of a cigar or torpedo, making it also noticeably stronger than traditional deck-to-hull line.

“Monsun“ was successful in ocean sailing so Laurin took the concept for his most famous, sea-kind and seaworthy boats and created a whole line of Laurinkosters. The differences to Monsun are small: modernised koster has added small pilot-house, hull is planked with Honduras or African mahogny, length-to-width ratio was changed in different designs but overall it’s the same boat.

“Meritaten” is one of them. She is nominally 3,2 ton Laurinkoster (in fact more thatn 4 ton), measuring 28 feet length, built in Honduras mahogny in Rosättra in 1958. Fritiof Gustaffson with Janne (his son) have built her on order from SXK as a lottery boat.
Luckily Janne is still with us today, he is a great source of information and help if we find ourselves in trouble repairing our boats.

It’s been a couple of years that I kept my eyes open on the market after Laurinkoster. At first I focused on GRP boats as I was warned that wooden boats, in general, will keep me busy with maintenance rather than with sailing. It’s also easier to maintain laminate boats - and there are more GRP Laurinkosters on the market.

While that’s true I’ve always been attracted to the “real thing” - wooden, classic Laurin.

I’ve seen a few of them before I found Meritaten. One of them was in Västervik - very decent lady but she has spent the last 12 years in a boat house. Not good for wooden vessel.

In the end I’ve found my boat very close to where I live - in Rosättra!

Christer, who owned her for the last 30 years, was looking for someone to take over. The price was open for discussion (as it is always for wooden boats here) so I went to take a look.

It was kind of rushing headlong into cumbersome situation - I’ve just finished exhausting and costly renovation of my Safir “Motoko”, buying new sails, renovating the hull and making new interior in walnut. Expensive it was, and tiring. But still - when the opportunity arises for a dream boat - and the one which has a potential to take you into the open sea - I didn’t want to loose it.

So I went.

So I looked.

And so I’ve felt in love.

Luckily I got accepted by Christer as a new owner and we’ve made a deal.

And here the story begins - a story soaked with the colour of oak, copper, bronze and mahogny. Soaked with smell of wood, linseed oil, Stockholm’s tar and wood resin. And the archeology of digging into 60 years of history of my dream vessel, fixing the faults, keeping the organic tissue of the boat protected from the hostility of marine elements.