Building La Grace
It began with a dream
Captain Josef Dvorský remembers:
At a certain age almost every boy dreams of becoming a pirate or a sailor and sailing the seas and oceans of the world. I was no exception. I started out on small dinghies on Rozkoš, the "East Bohemian sea". Step by step I worked my way up to larger boats at sea. The turning point for me was The Tall Ships Races, which I took part in with the Poles and the Bulgarians and later on my own boat, PRINCESS. There I got to see the largest and most beautiful sailing ships in the world. I watched how proud the individual countries were of their historical sailing ships and how they presented themselves with them at the biggest maritime festivals and international races. I felt that the Czech Republic too, which may have no sea but is home to many fine sailors, ought to have a unique ship of its own to represent us.
In 2008 I came to Libštát with a small group of friends, bringing a model of a replica of a ship from the second half of the 18th century and the naive notion that we would manage to find sponsors or a grant to finance this project to build a Czech sail training ship. But people rarely believe in ideas that bold. In most cases such notions and plans turn into the unattainable dreams of madmen, and only a fraction of people manage to turn them into reality. I presented our project in many places, and although everyone liked it a great deal, nobody said to me: "Right, let's go and get started." In the end I realised that the impulse I was waiting for from others had to come from me. Everyone else was waiting patiently to see whether my dream would become reality or run aground.
A great example to me was my friend and seafarer Ruda Krautschneider. I spent a large part of my life studying his thoughts and ideas. Thanks to him I found answers to some of the difficult questions ordinary people face. I began turning problems and obstacles into advantages. I packed my bags and, with Viktor Neuman, who understood, flew off to Egypt. There I paid a ten per cent deposit on the ship of my dreams. It was all the money I had saved at the time, and I had no idea at all what would happen next, or where I would find the rest. But nobody else knew that I did not know.
We felled the trees, cut them up and started drying them on the Saharan sand. It was so crazy that it attracted the sensation-hungry media. That broke the ice between me and the people who dreamed the same dream but whose ordinary lives allowed them only to dream it. A wave of volunteers rose up, offering me all kinds of help. One could do this and another that, and all of them together. People worked for nothing, in their free time, on a shared dream. Thanks to them, a genuine replica of an 18th-century ship began to grow on the Suez Canal. The build was not easy and we had to deal with a great many problems. By then, though, there were a lot of us, and so it went much more easily.
The build itself
We started building the ship at the end of 2008 in a professional shipyard in Suez, Egypt. The main reason for choosing that place was the fact that all ships there are still built the traditional way. If you turn a blind eye to the T-shirts with advertising slogans that the local workers wear, you get the impression that you are in the 18th century. The local carpenters have proved many times over that they can do incredible things with wood using an absolute minimum of tools. Teaching them anything new, however, turned out to be almost impossible. But thanks to that a high-quality replica began to take shape. Just as in the 18th century, a model had to be made by Dan Rosecký so that the ship could be built from it. Thanks to the Suez Canal, quality timber from Scandinavia, which in the golden age of sail was the most popular and most usual building material, is also easily available in Egypt. The keel and ribs of the ship, however, are of extremely hard and durable camphor and mulberry wood. The planking and the decks are of Finnish pine.
The masts, yards, tops and blocks, and also the ship's wheel and the guns, we made in Valašské Meziříčí. From June 2009 dozens of volunteers from all over the Czech Republic gathered in Vilém Pavlica's joinery. They discovered modern technological methods, but also old techniques that often proved faster and more efficient, they learned to splice ropes and much more. In December 2009 it all sailed to Egypt in a container.
The following year was mostly in the spirit of the 21st century. The ship got an engine, a generator, water and electrical systems. Most of the work was again done by Czech specialists and volunteers.
La Grace was ceremonially launched on 5. 12. 2010, after not quite 2 years of building.
The building of the ship was financed exclusively from private funds. It could not, however, have been done without the help of hundreds of volunteers from all over the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
For them and for other enthusiasts there is also The La Grace Friends' Club.
Thank you to everyone who took part in the build and gave this ship life.