About my Marieholm IF: Brief overview

Let’s start the English version of my blog — pretty simple yet — with the description of my sailboat.

In February 2023, I finally moved to Norway. The hard thing with the immigration was (among others) that I had to leave behind my previous boat, Swedish thirty-feet Semona. So I needed a sailboat to start with. My budget was very tight, and I was considering two options:

• Start saving money, wait, and buy a new boat later.
• Buy something cheap and use it while getting used to my new life in Norway.

Of course, waiting was not the actual option. So once it got more or less warm during my first summer in Norway, I noticed and bought the “Marieholm IF” sailboat for only 20 000 NOK (apx. 1 800 EUR), that was located in Bergen, and it took three days to bring it to Egersund, current location of the boat.

About the boat model

Marieholm IF is one of the most popular Swedish sailboat models. The “IF” abbreviation means “international folkboat”, refering to the original wooden Nordic Folkboat model, that this boat was based on (both were designed by Tord Sundén). My boat was built in 1974 — it is the first version of Marieholm sailboat, compared to later “Marieholm 26” and “Marieholm 261” versions, if I don’t miss anything.

The boat has the following characteristics:

Initial state of the boat

Of course, the condition of the boat was according to the price, no questions. The mast, the rigging and the sails were more or less ok, also there was a toilet inside and a pretty new Yamaha 4.0 HP outboard engine from 2021, but these were basically all the amenities:

• There was no electrical system at all. Nothing, just some fragments of wires, couple of broken navigational lights and nonfunctional instruments panels from 1992. It looks like the system was removed many-many years ago before purchase.
• All the interior was in very poor state. Rotten plywood panels with specific smell, no ceiling, uncovered walls painted unprofessionally many years ago, leaking windows, a crude makeshift floor quickly put together and so on.
• From outside, the boat was painted approximately twenty years ago, and probably quickly and with some random paint once more later, so all the paint got cracked, dirty and peeling off in layers, so actually I was ashamed to share any detailed photos with my friends (except the one above).

All this meant, that I had a full freedom to do whatever I want with the boat — any improvement even with my pretty amateur skills could make the boat better. The idea was pretty simple: I fix the boat, so I fix myself after immigration.

So, I started the improvements process closer to the end of 2023, and it still continues, turning into almost “serious” renovation. But because I need to balance between renovation, limited budgets, skills and time, and actual sailing, of course it leads to some compromises.

The name

While it is considered as a bad tradition, I also decided to rename the boat into “Mirovia II”, keeping the name of my previous boat. The reason is that the name reflects the concept, that is very important to me.

Mirovia is the name of hypothetic ancient ocean, when there were no separate continents at the early Earth. No continents. No countries. No boundaries. And also no conflicts, no wars, nothing that was artificially separated and divided. Basically for me it is the concept of integrity, unity and also of the peace, which are the things that we definitely miss nowadays.

When my Croatian and Serbian colleagues talk — it is Mirovia. When I see cars with Russian and Ukrainian license plates parked together in Montenegro — it is Mirovia. When my Norwegian colleague helps me to get driving practice before local exams — it is also reflection of Mirovia.

While the name is slightly connected to the Russian language, there is no word like this, and surprisingly it was suggested by non-Russian scientist — and this is another reason, that adds the “juice” to the idea.

In the next post I uncover what I’ve already done with the boat.