G
eir Røvik is a man used to working in Johan Anker’s
shadow; he set up his first wooden boat repair business
by renting the site of the great designer’s yard at Vollen,
and has always been fiercely proud of that connection.
He himself started, as the best shipwrights often do, by dragging
his long-suffering mother down to the waterside as a small child,
fascinated by the sounds and smells of the construction and repair
of wooden boats. Later, aged just 16, he bought a “terrible rotten
54ft (16.4m) wooden fishing vessel”. But disaster struck. After a
jolting lorry journey in a slip wagon she was badly damaged,
“looked curved like a banana”, and had to be scrapped.
Røvik, who had sunk every penny he had into her, was now
broke and had to take stock, returning first to carpentry school and
then to a proper apprenticeship in north Norway, 45 miles above
the Arctic Circle. After this, with skills to match his tireless energy
and enthusiasm, he has never looked back.
Nowadays Røvik is doubly famous – for being one of Norway’s
best-known specialists in wooden boat restoration, and as the
driving force behind Tønsberg’s scale-replica Viking longship,
Saga Oseberg. I met him in his local museum, a very tall man with
flowing locks and an unusual plaited beard, talking to a crowd of
chattering five-year-olds. Later we went to see his own yard, which
is crammed with vintage craft of every description, waiting for his
input. He is passionate about wooden boats and the continuity of
ancient methods and traditions, which often means looking deep
into the past to find the correct techniques and materials.
Pride of place in the Røvik boatyard is a hand-operated
100-year-old tilting saw, where the blade moves rather than the
table. Røvik claims there may be only two or three left in Norway
(in museums) but his works perfectly.
He proudly lifts plastic sheets to reveal great stacks of long fine
wood, which he calls his “treasure”. Across the way there are
whole tree trunks, waiting for the right use, the right boat. He
stresses that with planking it is vital to use one run from stem to
stern, whenever possible, to ensure optimum strength, but that
means having the right wood close to hand.
Around the yard there are working and sailing craft in every
stage of restoration and Røvik reels out his tape measure, pointing
out the key details of each, reiterating that “you must always avoid
joints, always”. A friend tells me that Røvik is famous for advising
cash-strapped boat owners, often making a tricky
missing part and showing them how to fit it
themselves. His reputation might suggest he’s
keeping the old boats of southern Norway going.
We drive to Tønsberg and suddenly there is a
huge longship, blocking the riverside skyline. She
is vast and beautiful beyond words and Røvik
has been leading her construction from the
beginning. The original is in the Bygdøy
Museum in Oslo. He says I must always
mention the “team”, but it’s clear Røvik has
been key to the scheme. Authentic replica Viking
tools have been used in her making where
possible and she was constructed outdoors
under the eyes of the local community – who
volunteered to help, with their hands and with
their hearts, in sunshine, rain, ice and snow, old
and young, in great numbers.
Røvik is full of surprises. He suddenly
re-appeared in full Viking costume, and we
clambered aboard. He explained that when you
made a boat in 820AD, the necessary skills
would have been handed down throughgenerations, so everyone in a settlement would have known
intuitively what part to play. With Saga Oseberg the process was
reversed. Thinking started in 2001, and construction began nine
years later. Every specialist skill had to be acquired, and authentic
techniques deduced through trial and improvement. It was
experimental archaeology from the very start.
Local and crowd-funding, and cutting-edge technology, drove
the project, with specialists contributing from all over the world,
especially the Roskilde experts from the Viking Ship Museum in
Denmark, who share a common vision. Vibeke Bischoff’s minute
analysis of the original Oseberg ship revealed a shocking truth: its
frame had been forced together wrongly when originally
reconstructed, which is probably why a previous full-scale replica,
Dronningen, capsized on its first sea trial in 1988. The bow water
had shipped over the sheer strake when she reached roughly nine
knots and a heel angle of 10 degrees.
After this some experts suggested that the original had been
designed for ceremony, not riding the ocean.
Of course there were hairy moments, as when a scale model
with the corrected structure was televised being tested in a water
tank at Marintek in Trondheim. Happily the corrected model
achieved a 15 degree heeling angle and stability up to 12 knots
which seemed to bear out Vibeke’s research. Norway’s King and
Queen were present and were invited to the actual launch, then
way into the future. No one yet knew for certain if the new design
would end in another Dronningen, but everything worked perfectly
when the great day came.
Meanwhile Røvik and his colleagues were combing
Scandinavian forests for huge oaks, testing templates against their
trunks and branches to find the right angle, the natural shape. He
eventually located a perfect tree for the keel in a local wood – this
was the “soul of the ship” so he was glad it had been found so
close to home. It was critical to get it right. Once construction
started, there was no going back.
As with most community projects, financial worries came and
went, as systematic measuring, infra-red surveys and thousands of
technical investigations of the original continued to dictate
construction methods back in Tønsberg.
Meanwhile, months of carving produced the richly decorated
stern and stem. A unique structural feature was Greenland whale
baleens, softened in boiling water, used to lash
the ribs to the hull, to create a flexible but stable
structure, “a ship that moves with the sea”. I
asked how long the lashings would last. “We
don’t know,” said Røvik. “That’s the point!”
We were standing on deck, with every
millimetre faithfully accurate to the original,
and strakes formed with an axe so skilfully they
had no need of planing. The 5ft “mastfish”
awaited her 40ft mast – and 81m² (871sq ft) of
woollen sails that had been woven by hand and
dyed. Røvik gazed upriver for a moment and
talked of taking Saga Oseberg to England. Last
summer, 2015, she made it to Denmark, a
triumph for the Tønsberg community. Vikings
were team players, on land and sea, unafraid to
harness the best of ancient technologies to break
new horizons in their sturdy longships.
If this one does reach your shores, try hard
to make a visit. She is a dream brought to
reality and standing on board you breathe the
air as the Vikings did, and understand the
powerful draw of adventure across the sea.“He says I must
always mention
the ‘team’, but
it’s clear Røvik
has been key to
the scheme”Above: Røvik with the King and
PHOTOS: JORGEN KIRSEBOM (TOP IMAGE: KNUT NORDHAGEN) Queen of Norway