Emancipation or farewell Kooi Makkum Yachtbuilders
When you hide it’s your birthday convinced no one will notice it, but not only your desk at the shipyard appears covered in birthday flags and a present from your colleagues, but the neighborhood brings homemade cakes, books and nice cards, it must mean, aside from the fact that you are surrounded by great and very kind people, that we have been a long time here.
To make a very large task achievable it helps to split it into little ones. This is how our mind works, only step by step we reach the end of a long project. Building and preparing the Vinson of Antarctica for the Southern Ocean has been this kind of challenge for everyone involved.
When the boat just looked like a pile of laser-cut aluminum frames and stringers, it was difficult to imagine that today we would have completed her construction, sailed her along seven thousand miles, and done a long and successful scientific expedition in the Arctic as a boat and project test. But the voyage continues, the plans for this vessel are mainly for the Southern Ocean region and Antarctica. Therefore this short Arctic season looks now like an aperitif, a crew training, a sea-trial before getting to the opposite geographical pole.
From the genesis of this venture until right now almost everything has happened here in the Netherlands. We are a very international project, but she is very much a Dutch boat. She comes from this historical land of boat builders, navigators, discoverers and explorers. She is from Frisland! from Makkum.
This Summer we went far, but technically we still were at home. Let’s say it was easy to think that whatever would happen to the boat, we would come back here and easily fix it. Nowhere better than at KM to do this or that adjustment, those modifications, that repair. But it’s time to leave and head towards the truly remote areas of the planet. Like a polar bear cub emancipating from its mother, the project has reached an age where we will technically deal with the boat by ourselves, somewhere else, far away.
It is a little sad, but the excitement of the adventures ahead wins. We are sailing south now. We will be landing tomorrow in the Canary Islands. It’s late at night, a trainee from the Puerto Williams Sailing School Cedena is on watch. A couple of hours ago the OGAP Plankton research team collected these magic little creatures from the Sea.
We are commuting from pole to pole, to the Vinson’s first Antarctic expeditions. After our first southern hemisphere Summer, the boat will winterize in Cape Town. It is altogether a very long trip, but everything arrives, step by step.
We took these photos while sailing between the Dutch sandbanks, arriving back home from Svalbard, by the end of August. These people are true sea lovers.
Kenneth Perdigón
Skipper
