Radio sailing - a truly moving experience

A very dear hobby of mine has been to build and race radio controlled sailing yachts. I have built more than 15 boats and raced in races all around the world. Here I am with my latest boat called 'Blåndin', a Graham Bantock design. Below you see a couple of shots of me with the boat giving you a sense of size of these little machines.

(The pictures courtesy of Bino Haeggström)

I have won numerous Finnish championships, a Nordic Championships. I have also participated in world Championships with best results being 4th in 1988 and 6th in 1994, generally I have been in the top 10 to 15th the other times. After joining Nokia I have had less and less time for this hobby, but in 2001 I decided to switch class to the smaller simpler International One Metre class One Metre class, which is a one metre long boat. This class is quickly becoming the most popular in the world. In Finland alone there is almost there are already 36 registered yachts.

This year I participated in the nationals, and managed to dig out some edge from the spine winning the two-day event with a decent margin. It is a moving experience when one really master something very deeply, where a break of 2 years seems like a week. The brain is an amazing recorder of eye-finger movement. I guess it is the same if you learn to play an instrument, you then know it for life. In Finland the typical example is ice skating.

Our federation FiRCS has been on-line from 1995 It is one of the first memories from the web I have and a wonderful example how global tribes can get in touch with each others. Anders Wallin our web master has done a wonderful job for several years keeping us up to date with anything and everything in the radio sailing field.