Why Wood, again

  At this moment  I am looking out over the harbour on Gamla Stan Island, the island that makes up a large portion of old Stockholm.  It is 4am, the water is mirror smooth and the sun is up. The days are quite long here now, the sun sets sort of around 2 am and is fully up by 4 am.

  
  Sweden is a seafaring nation and Stockholm is its capital and I suspect largest port. Over the last few days we've watched dozen of boats ply the waters outside of our windows.  There have been navy ships and cruise ships and ferries that travel to other outer islands.  Yesterday morning we went on a cruise around the old canals of Stockholm and saw house boats, some of them two story as well as hundreds of small personal boats.  We were told that one in every seven Swedes own and operate a boat.

Swedish house boats, lovely in summer, do they live here in the winter too?

   Many of the small boats we saw were fibreglass but many of them were wood.  At a rough guess I would have said 2 or 3% of the small boats were wood.


   As we travelled through the canals on a tour we was dozens of wooden boats of all sorts.

   This is a typical private wooden boat.  The design owes much to the dory, these boats are lapstrake hulls and pointed at both ends.  I saw this hull shape used in open boats with both motor and sail and in various sizes from 15 feet to close to 40 feet.  A good wooden boat that is well cared for can last for 100 years, fibreglass will not last half that long and requires more maintenance  that people realize.  Wood is great stuff.