Sven Yrvind

Sven Yrvind is a small boat designer, builder, sailor and writer…And a most fascinating individual.

Yrvind being received by the Queen and King of Sweden

Some quotes…

June 15 2014, under “boat ideal”, in a post titled “A Sermon”, he wrote:

“I started searching in earnest for the ideal little cruiser in the autumn of 1962. … In those days it was an odd thing to live on a small boat, but I had my reasons. Dyslexia had prevented me from getting a formal education and during my compulsory military service it soon became evident that my bosses and me had different ideas about how war should be conducted. I ended up in a maximum-security prison. I was cocky and did not behave. To punish me they added one more day of imprisonment for each day I misbehaved.” 

Later in the ‘sermon’, he wrote:

“A realistic alternative to this boring consumerism is to build a small well-conceived cruiser and head out to sea. There out on the big, blue, wet, deep, endless, living ocean, far from land and bureaucrats, there is little to worry about; there you can find peace and a life mentally similar to that of our ancestors.”

May 17, 2008, under “present project”:

“After decades of studying, designing, building and sailing small, ocean-going boats I have evolved a safe, functional design. Here is a brief description of Yrvind ½, my next boat in that series, embarrassingly named after myself. 

Her basic dimensions are length 4.8 meter, or 15 feet 9 inches, beam 1.3 meter or 4 feet 4 inches, draft 0.22 meter or 9 inches. Her intended displacement fully loaded will hopefully be 800 kilos or 1760 pounds. 

In designing her I have had invaluable help from Matt Layden. I hope to sail her down the Atlantic, east in the southern ocean to visit a friend Per in Melbourne.” 

“Weatherliness, especially when sailing slowly against strong winds and breaking waves, is also very much a question of having a large lateral area. Matt Layden’s chine runner configuration, incorporated into Yrvind ½, uses the boat’s vertical hull sides as lateral area. These can therefore be very much bigger than if she was an ordinary keel-boat.”

In early 2015, he stopped working on his “Around in Ten” boat… note that no-one showed up at the ‘start’ of the race.

Yrvind started work on his next ‘ideal’ boat, called “Ex Lex”, which is documented in posts under “present project” starting in April 2015 to the most recent post. (Design specs are similar to those he proposed May 17, 2008, as noted above, but extended to 5.76m (18’ 11”).

These posts are filled with ingenious solutions to building problems he encountered. For example… in the post of May 30, 2016 under “present project”, there is a short video of Sven demonstrating a prototype of his “yolo” based on a Japanese design.

March 26, 2016 under “present project”:

“The joy of cooking does not exclude the joy of eating.
The joy of boatbuilding does not exclude the joy of sailing.”

This site is worth perusing for insights on designing and building small boats, as well as cruising those same boats over thousands of miles of ocean.