The Grit #3: Jail to Sail – Birth of a Sailing Legend Sven Yrvind

Hi there,

Bernie here with your latest issue of The Grit.

Greetings from aboard Grit, the sailboat, not the newsletter. At the moment, I’m anchored in the New Bern, North Carolina, anchorage waiting for the winds to shift from Northeast to Southwest so I can sail to Oriental where I am giving a program on keeping wild-caught bees in my homemade horizontal hives. Who knew that sailing and beekeeping could go together?

In this issue of The Grit, how my sailing hero Sven Yrvind went from deserter to sailing legend and how Julia and I wrapped up our stay aboard Grit on Shackleford Banks.

Sven Yrvind’s transformation from jail to sail

In the 1980s, I read an article in Cruising World magazine about a Swede named Sven Yrvind who built a small boat in his mother’s basement. The boat’s name was Bris. Turns out the boat was too large to get out of the basement so Sven charmed a guy with an excavator to remove part of his mom’s house and dig a canal to a nearby bay, where Sven launched Bris.

He eventually sailed Bris across the Atlantic Ocean, surviving all kinds of adventures from head lice to living off burned tins of meatballs, and returned to Sweden as a sailing hero.

Sven and I have been in contact over the last few years. He’s now eighty-six years old, still building and sailing his boats across oceans so, of course, I had to interview him for the Travel Grit podcast. Sven and I had an incredible chat. He shared how his teachers beat him because they didn’t understand that he was dyslexic, how he was sent to jail for deserting the Swedish military and how a psychopath taught him the power of books.

Listen to Sven’s story

Rambling News: Grit and Wild Ponies

In the last issue of The Grit, I shared how my wife Julia and I were anchored off Shackleford Banks in our sailboat Grit. The mission of that ramble was to study the 103 wild ponies that call the 9-mile uninhabited island home.

What I failed to mention in my last update was how we got slammed in the night by a 40-knot gale that pinned us hard-up against a lee shore. And I mean really close — 20 feet. We survived that, only to be sideswiped by a 250-hp skiff that tried to help us in another incident.

Julia shared her trip on ConsideringAnimals.com where she just posted a beautiful piece on how the wild ponies on Shackleford Banks made her rethink human kind’s relationship to dominion over nature. I have just posted a page on RiverEarth.com where you can read the first 10 posts I wrote from Shackleford Banks.

Now Let’s Sail With Sven

I hope you’re enjoying some fine spring weather with enough adventure to keep you amused, but not enough pollen to make you sneeze.

Now let’s dig Sven’s boat out of his mom’s basement and sail across the Atlantic Ocean.

Stay Gritty,

Bernie

TravelGrit.com

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