On a crisp Saturday morning, sometime in February, he suddenly appeared on the quay: Evert Verkerk. We only knew his name from the Baltic’s sales brochure – “design: Evert Verkerk” – but we didn’t have an address or phone number. We did, however, have a lot of questions.
And now he just came knocking.
It turns out that after building his own ship, the Vesta, he quickly departed for the Mediterranean. Because of this, he never saw the Baltic completely ‘finished’. But once inside our salon, he noted that the finish looked suspiciously similar to his own (now sold) Vesta.
“We sailed the ‘old’, wooden Vesta in the Mediterranean,” he began to recount. “That ship was built for the Danish royal family [in 1892] and sailed fantastically. The salon had silver plaques with the names of the royal family members who had sailed on it. Very nice. But we received a good offer and decided to sell the Vesta.”
“Because it was such a magnificent ship, I wanted to rebuild it, but in steel. I drew the plans myself based on the model ship of the wooden Vesta. With those, I went to a shipyard in Groningen and had four hull cutting kits made. One for myself, which became the ‘new’ Vesta, and three to sell.”
One of those kits – the future Baltic – ended up in Hoorn with Robert Holthuizen. “That boy must have been about 16 at the time. He assembled and fitted out the interior himself. I can still picture him planing those two masts. That boy was incredibly handy. You should give him a call sometime,” Evert concluded his story. And we certainly will!
PS: A few years after its sale, the ‘old’, wooden Vesta sank in the harbor in a neglected state. The ship was later salvaged and restored to more or less its original condition. It still sails somewhere in the Mediterranean, as Vesta 1892. Unfortunately, the silver plaques and the rest of the original interior have perished.
