I was born and brought up close to the sea in Mariehamn, in the Aland Islands, in the Baltic at the entrance to the Gulf of Bothnia between Finland and Sweden. The islanders have a great history as mariners, and even today many are sailors, and several shipping companies are based there. The last commercial oceangoing sailing ships were operated from Mariehamn by Gustaf Erikson until 1947, one of which, Pommern, is now a museum ship there. My father was chief electrical engineer on the ferries between Mariehamn and Stockholm, and I started working on them as a deck boy aged 15.
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