The story of our Wild Duck.

 Frank has a friend living at nearby a harbour. He was filming his friend’s new boat and there we saw the ‘Wild Duck’. It was love at first site. But, she was not for sale.

Two years earlier there was a sign with ‘For Sale’. She was still lying in the same harbour so we thought that she was still owner by a Mr Kooper. We phoned Mr Kooper and asked him if he still wanted to sell the boat. He told us he had sold her a year ago to a neighbour. That’s why the boat was still lying there. Mr Kooper told us that the new owner would sell the boat again. He had already bought a bigger sailing boat. I got a email address in Bali (Indonesia). I emailed the owner of the Wild Duck to sell us the boat and he did. He send a friend from Holland to us, so we looked at the boat and within 15 minutes we had bought our Wild Duck.

It was June 2001. All we had to do was cleaned her up and we sailed the whole summer.

In October we found a big shed for the winter. There she lays every winter now. When she was laying in the shed we took all the parts from the boat which came off. We removed the old paint until she was back to bare wood. There were no rotten places. She looked like she did when she first came from the builder. The wood was still intact. We painted her in the new colours, Bordeaux red and broken White. The only things we replaced where the ropes and the fenders. We gave her a new name ‘ The Wild Duck’ because we think she is the only wooden Wild Duck in Holland.

The next summer we sailed to our harbour, and a guy who works for a boat magazine ( The Waterkampioen) saw us. He asks us if he could do a story on our boat in his magazine. So he came and asked us everything about our boat and his boss published it in the magazine. After the story was published we got an email from the brother of the builder and he told us that the boat was build in 1964 so she is 40 years old.

Everywhere we go we get good reviews. She is not a very fast sailing boat, but she is very steady. When they took the pictures we sent, the wind was force 6, nearly 7. We were sailing with everything we had. Then we felt point zero. It was very scary. Marleen thought we flipped over. But the Wild Duck didn’t. She rolled back and we sailed on. The pictures we had send you where taken that day. There are some photo’s you can see how far we went over.

Inside the boat we haven’t done anything. Now we have 3 sleeping places and a little kitchen. Frank wants to make one big bed and a sleeping place for our dog (It’s a Rottweiler). He will remove the kitchen from the inside to the outside. Where we are sitting outside he will make the kitchen. There we can put a sail above, so we can sit dry and make things and the boat will stay clean when we are not sailing. That’s work for next year.

Greatings Marleen and Frank Berlee.