AHTO WALTER - TRIBUTE TO A PIONEER

Roger Fothergill

I would like to place on record a tribute to one of the very earliest exponents of really small craft ocean cruising. I refer to Ahto Walter, who died at St Thomas in the US Virgin Islands on 1st July 1991.

Ahto Walter was born in Henste, Estonia on 15th July 1912, the youngest of four brothers all of whom, like their father who was a Master Mariner and shipowner, followed the sea. During his childhood Estonia, then a province of Czarist Russia, suffered the turmoil and horrors of the Bolshevik revolution, until in 1918, with the other Baltic States, for a short time it gained its independence.

As a boy of thirteen young Ahto, following the family tradition, went to sea - first in a four masted barquentine in which as a common sailor he visited the Baltic, Western Europe and Mediterranean ports as well as a deep water voyage to South America, experiencing at that tender age all the vicissitudes and hardships inescapable in the life of a foremast hand in the days of sail.

With the decline of sail he went into steam, and experienced the hard times and unemployment following the world trade depression as the 1920s came to a close. Perhaps it was this state of affairs that turned his thoughts towards the freedom of sailing the seas in a ship of his own, not as a temporary pastime or relaxation on some coastwise yachting jaunt, but essentially as a deep water voyager.

After the First World War yachting was still the sport of the wealthy; it wasn't until after the Second World War and a further redistribution of wealth that it came within the reach of the many. In the 1920s and early 1930s only the largest yachts of wealthy owners made ocean voyages, and not many of them. There had been a long period since the earliest pioneers of ocean cruising had made their voyages; Slocum's circumnavigation in the Spray between 1895 and 1898 and Voss's voyage in the Tilikum between 1901 and 1904. A small revival of interest took place immediately after the First World War, but it was by no means large. The only names which spring to mind are Alain Gerbault, Connor O'Brien and Lt G Muhlhauser RNR, but though none of these may have been drawn from the ranks of the very wealthy they were all established in life and could afford to indulge their fancies. This was far from the case with Ahto who, at the age of seventeen with only the meagre savings from his few years at sea and with very little help and less encouragement from his family, bought an old hull built in 1908 and abandoned on a mudbank for the equivalent of $72.00 and spent some time repairing, rebuilding and rerigging her, all on the thinnest of shoestrings.

This first vessel measured 29ft x 9ft x 5ft 6in and was a typical double-ended Baltic inshore design. He christened her Ahto, and if this should seem something of a conceit it must be pointed out that as well as his own name it was also the name of the God of the Sea in ancient Finnish/Estonian mythology and could be compared to Poseidon or Neptune, so that in fact it was quite appropriate.

In considering this hull against her only known contemporary practitioners of the art, O'Brien's Saoirse was 20 tons TM and 42ft LOA, Muhlhauser's Amaryllis by comparison huge at 63ft and only Alain Gerbault's Firecrest at 10 tons TM was fit to bear comparison, but she was still significantly larger than Ahto as well as being a far more suitable hull for such a venture.

Scorned by the local yacht club, who would not grant him membership so that he could have had the recognition of a club burgee, laughed at when he asked the Estonian authorities for official papers, he none the less departed in August accompanied by his brother Kou. They sailed for England and arrived in the London River where, I am happy to be able to record, they were received with enthusiasm, at any rate by the English newspapers. Proceeding along the south coast they duly arrived at Torquay where their youth and, I suspect, the undoubted charm of Ahto who seemed to be able to make fast friends wherever he went, so appealed to the sailing fraternity of the town that they found themselves made honorary members of the Royal Torquay Yacht Club.

Outward bound again they made the passage to Funchal, Madeira, in 22 days. From Funchal they sailed to Las Palmas where they laid in stores for the Atlantic crossing, but so broke were they by not that they could buy only the cheapest provisions, a good deal of which turned out to be spoiled before making a landfall in the Caribbean. Notwithstanding the shortage of food they pressed on to Miami, their final destination.

Here they received the standard American Welcome, besieged by press reporters and cameramen (television not then having been invented). A reception committee was soon formed in their honour who more or less gave them the freedom of the town, dining, wining and generally feting them. Though I suppose there must have been some small financial spin-off from all this, they were still very short of money and gladly joined up with two other young men who were prepared to put up some cash for a West Indian cruise, which duly took place.

Deciding to return to Europe before the winter they left the West Indies before the hurricane season and sailed north for New York. Here they received an ovation which made the one in Maimi pale into insignificance, not only the press reporters and cameramen but radio too, which was only in its infancy at that time. They were approached with all kinds of propositions, which included putting the boat on wheels and displaying it on a tour all over the States. Ahto also received several letters from young ladies offering proposals of marriage!

In that summer of 1931 prestigious East Coast American yacht clubs were busy organising an Atlantic yacht face from Newport, Rhode Island to Plymouth in England. The race was due to start on 4th July and the line-up for the start read as follows: Dorade (who won, and who incidentally gave her name to that famous ventilator), Skoal, Highland Light, Mistress, Amberjack (famous for her association with President Roosevelt), Ilex, Water Gipsey, Maitenes II and Lismore. The absolute 'lite of the day. Nothing seemed more natural to Ahto than that he should enter the race too! But alas, Ahto proved to be far, far below the minimum size limit and his entry had to be turned down. However he decided to tag along unofficially, just for the ride, and was duly mentioned by the newspapers in the press coverage of the event.

Brother Kou remained in the States and Ahto was accompanied by one of the two men who shared their Caribbean cruise, Peter Barber. He drove the ageing Ahto so hard during the race that she started to open up and only constant pumping and shortening sail kept her afloat, and if I read his character correctly I suspect that he blamed these factors for his not have been first across the line!

In England he sold the boat for £200. I believe the £ sterling stood at around $3.50 in those days so it was a considerably better price than the $72.00 equivalent for which he bought her. It probably made him richer than he had ever been before.

By the time he returned to Estonia he found that he was famous. The newspapers made him a hero and the Tallinn Yacht Club (which had refused him membership before he sailed) held a dinner in his honour. It was a few weeks after his nineteenth birthday.

He very quickly bought another boat which he also christened Ahto, but because of a strange superstition concerning the numeral 2, which is held to be ill omened amongst Baltic mariners, it never appeared on the second Ahto. She was actually two feet shorter than the first Ahto, her measurements being 27ft x 8ft 2in x 6ft, which produces a figure of 6.5 for her Thames Measurement tonnage. The first Ahto was 8.6 TM. However he considered her a much better hull than her predecessor and her record shows that she was certainly no worse. In appearance they were very similar, double-ended, both stem and sternpost above the waterline almost elliptical with the upper part of the stem curving aft and that of the stern curving forward. The second Ahto could also be said to have a bermudan sloop rig with the headsail set up to the stemhead, for though she actually carried a light bowsprit it seems to have seldom, if ever, been used.

Always short of funds, life aboard his boats was spartan. The first Ahto had no engine, so no electrics of course and thinks like freezers suitable for small yachts were anyway still far in the future. The second Ahto also had no engine on his first voyage, though one was installed at a later date. They slept on canvas bags stuffed with hay. There was no fixed galley in either boat, and cooking was done on a single burner Primus stove which was placed wherever was most convenient depending on weather conditions, usually the cabin sole. In any sort of weather at all it required two people to cook anything by this method, one to hold the stove stationary whilst the other handled the cooking utensil - hot food, or even drinks, seems to have been looked upon as a rare luxury.

He set sail again in November 1931 with another brother, Uku, and a third had who pressed him to be taken along. Life aboard so small a craft in the Baltic and North Sea in wintertime I find difficult to imagine, but once out of the Baltic they made a fast passage to Den Helder in Holland where another of Ahto's brothers, Jay, was waiting to join them. The third hand who had pressed to be taken on at the start of the voyage had proved unable to stand the conditions as well as having been seasick almost continually (one can but feel for him) and was duly `returned empty' from Holland.

As before they went to England, sailing along the south coast this time calling at Cowes, where they were given a suit of sails by Mr Thomas Ratsey, Torquay again and also Falmouth. It was by now January and they only met one other yacht in commission.

In mid January they sailed for Spain, experiencing very heavy weather in Biscay though oddly enough from the north-east; they ran before it under reefed main and reefed spinnaker! This was of course not the modern parachute type spinnaker, but still the first time I ever heard of any type of spinnaker being reefed. Ahto claimed they sailed 200 miles between one noon and the next on this passage, which has to be a record for a 27ft displacement hull!

They called at Vigo and the Cape Verde Islands, then made for Miami once more where they arrived on 31st March having sailed 5000 miles in 44 days. From Miami they sailed in a leisurely fashion northward, visiting several places and finally arriving once more in New York. Here Ahto spent two months, which was quite unusual as he rarely stayed very long in one particular place, but by 10th July 1932 they were off once more, bound eastward across the Atlantic on his fourth crossing. They sighted the Scilly Isles 20 days out but did not make any port before reaching the Thames. On their return to Estonia they once more received a tumultuous reception.

Ahto was never one to rest on his laurels for long, and after the briefest of rests he was back to his boat preparing her for his next voyage. With his brother Jay's help a new mast was made and it was at this time that he had a 5 hp auxiliary petrol engine installed - the small diesel was still many years in the future. Two young newspapermen applied to him as crew, offering to pay their expenses and one third of any royalties accruing from any articles they might write about the voyage. He also took an old friend, Tom Olsen, who later became his biographer, so that to start with there were four people packed into this very small vessel setting out on another winter passage of the Baltic and North Sea.

One has to assume that the Scandinavian races must possess an equability of temperament of an astonishingly high order to be able to contemplate, undertake and survive, still on good terms, the sort of conditions to be found in the Baltic and Gulf of Finland in late November cooped up in a tiny hull with no heating or even reasonable cooking facilities. Gales, snow and freezing rain were their daily and nightly portion. With a crew of four they had thought that a watch of three hours on deck would be reasonable, but the cold was so intense that even these rugged individuals found that they had to cut it down to two hours. However many clothes they put on they were half frozen, with hands and feet totally numb by the end of each watch. There was no heating below except that generated by their bodies and cooking, by their primitive method, was generally impossible. But Ahto thought nothing much about it - according to his biographer, he said they got all the breaks! `The wind was fair, it was milder than usual for the time of year' and as he truly went on to say, `We could easily have been frozen in for the winter'.

Having now got an engine in the boat they reached the North Sea by way of the Kiel Canal, sparing themselves the much longer passage through the Skagerrak. They wanted to reach London in time for Christmas, and though much delayed by fog, after stopping briefly at Lowestoft finally entered the Thames on 24th December and groped their way up river under power for as long as they could, finally having to come to an anchor as the visibility became nil. There was no change next day, Christmas Day, so they remained where they were with the sound of anchored vessels ringing their bells in the fog all around them.

They entertained themselves as best they could, which included the making of a Christmas pudding whose main ingredients were, and I quote: `A few bottles of blueberry juice, some flour, our last two potatoes, some ships' biscuits and a little alcohol'. It was their only course that meal and contrary to appearances they all claimed it was good! If that was the opinion it is my belief that it must have had a lot of alcohol in it.

Whilst in England on this occasion Ahto bought a radio receiver and had the vessel wired for electricity. The voyage ahead of them, though destined to finish once again in the States, was to include an African Interlude with the proposed aim, believe it or not, of organising a little `big game' shooting! To which end they had brought quite an arsenal in the way of rifles, revolvers and the necessary ammunition.

Ahto made his by now customary mid winter passage along the Channel coast of England, calling at Cowes where they had Ahto slipped for a bottom scrub and antifouling. They also gave the topsides two coats of paint, but it was so cold still that the paint froze before it could dry properly.

It was still the dead of winter, the end of January, when they proceeded to sea once more to continue the voyage. Again they suffered a stormy Biscay crossing, the more normal headwind passage this time. One of the newspapermen was swept overboard and only recovered with great difficulty, from the effects of which experience they feared for some time that he would die. However it seems that newspapermen, as well as ocean cruising yachtsmen, have to be pretty tough for in the event he recovered.

They called at Vigo, Madeira and the Canary Islands, from which latter place they made their descent upon the African coast, stopping first at Villa Cisneros in what was then the Spanish colony of Rio D'Oro (now Western Sahara). This was for the benefit of the newspapermen, since Villa Cisneros had become the place of exile/imprisonment of a number of royalist and other political prisoners taken during the Spanish republican revolution of 1931. Several attempts of varying success had then just recently been made to rescue them, and they hoped to get a ringside seat if there was going to be another attempt. Not unnaturally the crew of Ahto received a somewhat cold reception and very soon decided that a diplomatic withdrawal would be in order. They sailed for the nearby Port Etienne in French West Africa (now Mauritania), and from here made the final run to Bathurst in Gambia. This place too, like the others mentioned, was a European colony, of England this time. I really do not know what its political status is at the present but Bathurst, as a place name, no longer exists.

The Gambia River debouches into the Atlantic Ocean at just about the nipple of the bulge of Africa, if I may be forgiven for so describing it, and it was the riparian areas of this territory that they had decided would be a suitable locale for their `big game' shoot. They pressed on up the river to nearly a hundred miles from its mouth, which was almost certainly a record at that time.

All that need be said about their Safari is that their approach to the project would have made experienced hunters' hair stand on end as well as turn white at the roots. If, by this time, Ahto's voyages had made him a formidably experienced seaman, the same could not be said for his `bush craft' - but perhaps it is hardly to be expected from one born on the shores of the Baltic. Beyond mentioning the amusing (?) episode of stepping on a 14 foot python, which happily was in a heavy doze having just eaten, I will draw a veil over it all. By a miracle they all survived.

Returning down the river to Bathurst the two newspapermen, probably thinking that they had enough material to last the rest of their lives, returned from whence they came, and Ahto and Tom Olsen undertook the rest of the passage alone. They left the Gambia on 17th May and sailed once again for the United States. Starting from a position so far south they experienced doldrum weather which delayed them, they once again ran short of provisions, and it was 50 days before they reached New York, on 6th July 1933. Ahto was just a week short of his 21st birthday.

This brings us to the end of what may fairly be described as Ahto's yachting cruises. In the previous three years he had made five Atlantic crossings, a Caribbean cruise and the African interlude, as well as two winter passages across the Baltic and North Sea.

The later details of Ahto Walter's life are not germain to the thesis of these notes. Sufficient to say that he remained connected with the sea and small craft but in their more commercial aspects. There followed a circumnavigation in a 90ft ketch - inevitably rechristened Ahto - which was overtaken by the outbreak of the Second World War, leading to the withdrawal of all his crew when the vessel was in the East Indies. Undeterred Ahto sailed the vessel back to the States with himself and one other hand.

He finally settled, and later married, in St Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, where he became a founder member and first Commodore of the St Thomas Yacht Club. By that time the yachting scene had degenerated, progressed - take your pick - at any rate evolved into the aspect it bears today when transatlantic voyages are almost commonplace.

But the honour and glory always belongs to the forerunners, everything is very much easier once someone else has shown you that it can be done; and he truly showed us the way. I feel very strongly that to those of us who follow, as best we can, his chosen way of life, which much include all members of the Ocean Cruising Club, his passing should not go unrecorded. Ahto Walter, one of the pioneers.

NB: Mary Barton has drawn my attention to the chapter entitled Five Times Across in Humphrey Barton's Atlantic Adventurers, also devoted to Ahto Walter's remarkable achievements. Tom Olsen's book referred to in the text is called Racing the Seas, and was published by Messrs Hurst & Blackett Ltd, London.