Whatever crew is onboard gets to decide which island to visit and for how long. "I prefer to think of the ship more as a way of life than a charter boat," says Logan. After all that, could anyone doubt Alvei was now a full-fledged sailing ship? But she made it in fine fettle, only to drop her anchor right into the hold of a sunken wreck! Extricating the hook necessitated several hours of scuba diving, the assistance of a local fishing boat, repair of the windlass (that broke trying to raise the fouled anchor) and a several day delay to the schedule.
The shakedown cruise to Vigo, Spain, ended up a baptism by fire, as the ship scudded before gale-force winds and 25-ft seas. On January 16 1995, Alvei Norse for 'one who goes everywhere' sailed for the first time in her 75 years of life. "Oh, well, the bill ended up being less than estimated, so what the heck." In November, 16 beautiful brand new white sails finally arrived from Hong Kong. As each obstacle was surmounted, it seemed like another two would present themselves. Logan figured the conversion would take two years. Like all boating projects, though, time and material estimates pretty much flew out the window after awhile. Logan, Willems a boilermaker by trade and the main welder on the project and a band of believers more or less just threw on the docklines in Portugal and got to work. Logan and partner Bart Willems bought Alvei in Norway in the fall of 1986, and by the time they reached Gaia, Portugal, where the conversion/rebuild would take place, they had already bought the wood for the topmasts (in Norway) and the steel for the lower masts and yards (in Holland) for bargain basement prices. All the Scotland-built Alvei needed in the way of hull modifications was the addition of a 2-foot-deep, 15-ton ballast shoe run the length of the keel. Throughout the process, the ships retained the graceful, slender hulls of their sailing forebears. As time went by, the engines grew larger and the sails smaller until the latter were used for little more than stabilizing the ride. Like the steam schooners, the 'lugers' started out as sailing ships with small engines. Similar to the famous steam schooners of the West Coast (of which the Sausalito museum ship Wapama is the last one), Alvei was part of a transitional style of ships whose lineage traced the path from sail to steam. It was a 92-foot steel cargo boat originally built as a herring drifter in 1920! Not only was the vessel he bought not a schooner, it wasn't even a sailboat. "And I thought I knew enough to avoid all their mistakes."īut what he ended up with must have seemed to some the biggest mistake possible. "I'd been sailing other people's versions for 12 years," he says. He skippered the latter vessel for several of her extended voyages in the mid '70s.īy the mid '80s, Logan was ready for a big schooner of his own. Square riggers and 'working' schooners such as Sophia, and Regina Maris were his preferred mode of travel. Through the various stints of fun/work as a fine artist, graphic artist and ship master, Logan who still calls Lockeford, California, home was never far from sailing. "Melville noted that to the Tahitian way of thinking, work and play should be the same thing," he recalls. In the latter's book Typee, one passage helped form a life philosophy. Lautoka to New Zealand, October 2011-January 2012įrom an article in Latitude '38, May 1995īack in his formative years, Evan Logan was a voracious reader of the great novels of the sea Conrad, London, and particularly Melville.
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