Opua: a short history of THE HAWKE OF TUONELA
Opua: a short history of THE HAWKE OF TUONELA
Her hull was being laid up in Clearwater, Florida, as EGREGIOUS and I were rounding Cape Horn in December 1975, and she was launched the following month.
Her first owners were a syndicate who raced her on the East Coast under a generic name. I was told it once, but have long forgotten. “Brilliant” or “Dazzling”. Something like that. Her original gel coat, now under several coats of various shades of green paint, is the same yellow as EGREGIOUS.
After a couple of years, the syndicate donated the boat to the U.S. Naval Academy.
I received an email some years ago from a naval officer after an article I wrote about THE HAWKE OF TUONELA ran in a magazine. He said that he was captain of the Naval Academy’s sailing team when the sloop was donated and was given the task of choosing a name from a supplied list. He choose HAWKE after a sloop of war in the early American navy.
The Naval Academy used HAWKE in their sailing program and raced her, including I think in at least one Bermuda Race.
In time they sold her to the man from whom I bought her in July 1993. I’m not sure how she moved from Annapolis to inland Lake Champlain, between Vermont and New York, perhaps on her own bottom, powering up the Hudson River and through the Champlain Canal, a route I followed in reverse to take her back to the sea.
When I was looking to buy a boat in England ten years earlier, I considered an early Swan 37, which some of you know were built in Finland.
Composer Jean Sibelius, also from Finland, wrote a short piece called “The Swan of Tuonela,” Tuonela being the land of the dead in Finnish mythology. I thought a good name for a Swan sailboat would be just “Of Tuonela.” When I bought HAWKE, a change of species seemed acceptable.
Her first summer under my ownership was spent at City Island, New York, and in October I sailed her south to Florida.
She was still in the Florida Keys the following year when Carol and I met. We were married in Key West.
Carol was on a six month leave of absence from her job at a Cambridge, Massachusetts, architectural firm. When her leave ended, we left THE HAWKE OF TUONELA at a Marathon, Florida, boat yard.
I returned the next spring and sailed her north.
We moved aboard in May of 1996, kept to the plan, and sailed for the Azores in May of 2001.
Our route was a big‘Z’ across the North and South Atlantic Oceans. Portugal, Spain, Gibraltar, Senegal, Brazil, South Africa.
Just before Christmas in Brazil, Carol’s former partners asked her to return to the firm, and she decided that, after seeing South Africa, she would.
I continued east from Cape Town, completing my fourth circumnavigation upon reaching Sydney, Australia, in February 2003.
In September 2003 I sailed across to New Zealand, where THE HAWKE OF TUONELA has found a home, although she has sailed up to French Polynesia and back; up to Tonga and Fiji and back; and gone around the world in eighteen months, from April 2008 to October 2009, a voyage she made faster than EGREGIOUS’s long ago world record time.
I have owned her far longer than any other boat and sailed her about as far.
I told Carol during her recent time aboard to leave THE HAWKE OF TUONELA as though she was never going to return.
I will do the same, with memories but without regret, although until she finds a buyer it does quite seem real.
The top photo was taken off Boston sometime during my early days of ownership by SAIL magazine.
The last was taken last month.
Friday, March 9, 2012