AT 82 YEARS OLD HE SAILS 3,571 MILES IN 78 DAYS, WITH A BOAT BUILT BY HIM
82-year-old Sven Yrvind has just completed a 3,571-mile (5,747 km), 78-day solo journey aboard a small boat built with his own hands in his home garage.
It dropped moorings in Ålesund (Norway) on June 30, at an average speed of 2 knots.
The ‘Exlex Minor’ sailboat that the Swede has designed, built and sailed is a “mountain bike of the oceans”, 5.8 meters long and 1.23 wide with a draft of 0.2 meters.
As soon as the quarantine in Faila ends, which must comply with the sanitary protocol in the Azores, the navigator will depart by plane to return to his home in Västervik, having fulfilled the dream of sailing in the Sargasso Sea.
He has one pending adventure: reaching the antipodes with his micro-boat.
Yrvind set sail from the Norwegian coast in early summer with the intention of reaching New Zealand, but found that the boat was not prepared to withstand the wind and wave conditions in the Indian Ocean, so he decided to set the Azores as a final destination of the journey.
His story
In 1968 he sailed on a 12-meter boat to Rio de Janeiro. And when he arrived he said: “A big ship has big problems, that’s why I will return to the boys, they only give small problems.”
So he built a four-meter boat to cross the Atlantic again. A feat, because he could hardly lie down and where water, food and clothing had to ration to extremes
In 1970, at age 31, he built another tiny 20-foot plywood sailboat, Bris I, with which he reached the island of St. Helena in the Southern Hemisphere.
In 1989, he crossed the Atlantic from Sweden to New York via Ireland and Newfoundland.
In 2005 he built a new 27 foot sailboat with which he sailed from Sweden to Florida.
In 2008 he manufactured the Yrvind.com, a small sailboat measuring 4.60 meters and 1.30 in beam, to which he placed a mizzen pole in which he held the wind pilot and an oar as a rudder, with which in 2011 it took 45 days to navigate the Portuguese islands of Madeira and Martinique.
It was a solo journey that encouraged him to undertake what he called the definitive journey: “around the world on a three-meter sailboat”
The departure of that definitive trip was delayed until 2018, and at the age of 78, he did so on the ‘Exlex’ of 5.76 meters. , where he dropped moorings in Ireland with the intention of arriving in New Zealand almost a year later. It could not be.
Arriving in Sweden after his frustrated journey to New Zealand, he began to build ‘Exlex Minor’, the last of his micro-ships, which he continued to dream of in Oceania.
And that’s when he resumed his adventure ……
