HOW WE SAVED EACH OTHER

A retired special ops man, a lifelong dream and a classic ketch that showed up at just the right time

- SAM HAMILTON

Let no one, least of all this magazine, if only by implication, ever tell you that restoring an old wooden boat is easy. In 2010, Danish man Bendix Sandfoss Laxvig was visiting Copenhagen and spotted a 66ft (20.1m) ketch lying in Frederiksholm Canal. She’d been there for 26 years, letting the elements wreak their havoc on her fabric. Bendix, a lifelong member of the Frogman Corps (the Danish equivalent of the SBS or Navy Seals), had been sailing since the age of eight, starting with a friend in Optimists out of Elsinor and moving into the yacht-racing scene in Denmark, helming everything from Folkboats to X-boats, with some of the country’s most noted sailors. Through all these years, Bendix somehow managed to avoid owning a boat of his own. The dream of boat ownership, however, had been planted in his mind at the age of 25 when, while travelling with the Frogman Corps, the owner of a classic 12-M invited Bendix and some mates aboard for a tour, above and below decks. “There was a soul... and a smell... to it,” he recalls. “I remember thinking, ‘if I get the money when I’m older, I’ll buy a boat just like this’.”

When Bendix visited Copenhagen on that sunny July day and spotted Akela, that time had come – money was tight, but a pension was looming, and there was a new impetus to the timing. “My fiancée was dying,” he said. “We knew she had only two to four months to live, and I had to find a different way to live. I thought Akela might need a little paint.” It turned out Akela was indeed for sale, but at a price beyond Bendix’s reach; a price, however, that the owner quickly dropped once he realised that Bendix was going to be the man to save the yacht and keep her in her home waters of Denmark.