Small shipmodels made by small hands. (Photo: Küllike Rooväli)

The “Tallinn” used to be the children’s ship

In the year 2000, the city of Tallinn acquired a namesake ferry and sold it to be demolished a mere year later. Thus, this year the city made the Youth Maritime Club – that had occupied the Tallinn ferry for 20 years and served the maritime interests of Tallinn’s youth since 1959 – homeless.

For the seventh summer in a row, the children of the Youth Maritime Club have their summer camp at Pakri Bay, from where the Paldiski South harbour is clearly visible. It is a place where they can apply the skills learned during the winter, and also see in practise that all maritime activities are highly dependent on weather conditions: the types of winds and waves. In that camp they will learn to sail the svert-boats, to row and to swim; the only thing capable of chasing them out of water being the red flag raised in the flagpole.

Boat-shaped tents and a mess room reminding of a boat that has been turned over, built to face the dominant wind direction – all this has been created by the teachers themselves, reveals Ms Katrin Mellis, current Camp Manager, who herself grew up as a member of the Youth Maritime Club. For the previous ten years, the camp has been held at the coast of Western Estonia, and after that for 20 years at the Muhu Island.

Two generations of maritime interest
The educators of the current Youth Maritime Club are continuing the work carried out by their educators – they have all been brought up as members of the Youth Maritime Club.

For example, Mr Ago Kalberg, president of the Estonian Marine Modellers Association, has learned building of ship models from an early age on board the club’s training ships – at first on Koit, then on Tallinn. By now, he has spent 20 years passing on his knowledge to the younger generation. Besides the crafting skill, youth will also obtain good working habits, and their initial joy from the ship model, built with their very own hands, will further lead to high titles achieved in competitions.

For decades, aquatic motor sports have been the other so-called trademark of the club. Similarly to the modellers, the youth involved in motorboating have won quite a few medals over the time.

The Aaslav-Kaasik aquatic motor sport family is an excellent example of how many generations of the same family compete together and opposite each other in the competitions. On the 8th of August, the club’s former member Toomas Mets won the champion title of class O-125 of the Motorboating World Championship in Tallinn.

The club is also home to a cabin boys’ crafting circle, as well as to several seamen’s circles (pre-vocational training of sailors and motorists).

An exception
We hear complaints that there is nothing left of Estonian maritime culture. That the once free coast dwellers have forgotten seafaring due to the closed borders and split boats of the recent past. The Youth Maritime Club was an exception in that area – the trainees of the club were free to access the coastal waterways of Estonia. The annual summer maritime camp and the travels on training ships took children to islets where none of their peers were able to set foot.

According to Ms Küllike Rooväli, reporter for the national newspaper Postimees, such pleasant summer vacations also served to broaden the children’s outlook on life and leave impressions of the beauty of Estonian nature, sea and people who feel at home at the seashore. Several club members turned out to be seamen; some of them are acknowledged persons in other fields. The Youth Maritime Club gave them a set of skills that are universally usable. For example, good working habits that can be practised – in the absence of finer crafting tasks – either by scouring the ship deck, scraping off rust or painting it.

All the club’s trainees know where the bow or stern is on a ship, which line is the shortest, and how the points of the compass are referred to at sea. They learned to row, sail as well as to swim, use the rescue equipment, perform simple navigation tasks and sailors’ handicraft.

Important knowledge
Trainees learned to understand that the sea can sometimes be merciless and shaky, the weather ever changing – sometimes within a few minutes – and that the sea demands the utmost from everyone. If people do not recognise this, then the sea travels taken as an adult can have an unfortunate ending. But how should a dry-land person know that the regulation-determined equipment for sea travels is not just another bureaucratic folly? How should someone who is not familiar with the sea know that a quiet bay could change into a field of wild frothy waves within half an hour, adds Ms Küllike Rooväli, who has her daughter Elisabeth also participating in the Youth Maritime Club.

As a state institution, the Youth Maritime Club was already an exception during the Soviet era. When hundreds of similar institutions all over the Soviet Union were military-patriotic, then Estonian club was a lone civilian institution. During the years 1971–1980 the club was active on the training ship Koit (ex Verhojansk), and then the former Tallinn-Helsinki line ferry Tallinn was given to the youth club. The ship was refurbished, several workshops and training classes with installations were set up on it and in the 1980’s it hosted up to 80 training groups with a total of 1,150 trainees.

The fleet of the Youth Maritime Club has for example contained three Junga ships. The first one was a seal-hunting schooner (ex Bakan), acquired from Finland in 1964; the second one was a 1964–1972 period 132-passenger ship (ex Sulak), and the last Junga was a rebuilt pilot vessel from the year 1972. In the same year, the fishing trawler Suurlaid was also converted into a training ship. Similarly, the Juku ship (built in 1953), converted into a training ship in 1983, used to be a fishing trawler.

Demolished in 2003
The downfall pretty much began in the year 2000, when the Ministry of Education transferred the responsibility for the Youth Maritime Club to the city of Tallinn. The mayor of Tallinn at the time concluded a contract with real estate developers in which the white passenger ship, brought to the run down Fishing Harbour, was listed as an object adding value to the sea view from the newly built houses. After selling the sea view as such, the city sold the Tallinn the next year and it was demolished in the winter of 2003, in that very same place, in the middle of the city.

The youth club was given a lease on half of an abandoned kindergarten building, and the educators, enthusiasts in their field, were given a recommendation to form a non-profit organization. That organization was lucky enough to be able to purchase back one of the smaller ships – the 18m Suurlaht (ex Suurlaid) from the city of Tallinn. The second training ship, Juku, now belongs to the Estonian Maritime Academy, and the Tallinn City Government sold the third one, Junga, to Finland.

After demolishing the Tallinn, the city government bailed out and ceased to support the Youth Maritime Club; therefore the 180 trainees of the club will not be able to commence their studies this year.

Vice Admiral Tarmo Kõuts, the Commander of the Defence Forces, reminiscences that back in the early 1990’s, when he was still the Director of the Estonian Maritime Academy, the city of Tallinn used to give substantial support to the Youth Maritime Club and its fleet.

– If we fail to bring up the new generation in accordance with the best maritime traditions and do not develop our maritime culture, we will have no future as a seafaring nation, he expresses his concern.

//Madli Vitismann