Gerhard Peter Ronne's RUNAs

摘要

In 1907, Gerhard Peter Ronne of Copenhagen, Denmark, joined a close friend, Knud Degn, for a Homeric sailing adventure aboard Knud's small cruising yacht, RAN. In the Skaggerak, the strait between Norway and Sweden, they were beaten by storms, battled rough water and steep seas, and even sailed through a rare middle-of-August snowfall. Yet the hardships did nothing to dissuade Gerhard from the cruising life, which he took to so enthusiastically that by the end of the voyage he had bought RAN from his friend. It was the beginning of an extraordinary passion that led Gerhard to design his own sailboats based on his extensive cruising experience-though yacht design never became a profession for him. For the rest of Gerhard's life, he never failed to set off on a new sailing adventure every summer, making time even during his student years and his architectural career. He designed only ten small yachts, most of them for his own use. Ten is a minuscule number compared to the work of most yacht designers, yet each yacht is exceptional, and perfectly suited for the type of cruising that Gerhard loved so well. In recent years, four of them have been painstakingly rebuilt, restoring not only the yachts themselves but also Gerhard's legacy.