Ketch from the Åland Isles 50 (sic) years ago & Swedish Ketch, Experiment

Description

A ketch is a two-masted sailing craft whose mainmast is taller than the mizzen mast (or aft-mast). The name “ketch” is derived from “catch” or fishing boat. Historically the ketch was a northern European square-rigged vessel, often a freighter or fishing boat, particularly in the Baltic and North seas. (Today a ketch tends to be a fore-and-aft rigged pleasure yacht, like a yawl; but a ketch’s mizzen mast is taller and its mizzen sail is larger than a yawl’s). The ketch rig was a much more common option twenty or thirty years ago than it is now. It was often used to split a large sail area up into smaller, more manageable pieces. As sail handling equipment has improved it has become possible for even very large yachts to carry all their sail on a sloop rig while still being manageable by a small crew. (The Åland Islands or Åland is an archipelago province at the entrance to the Gulf of Bothnia in the Baltic Sea belonging to Finland. It is autonomous, demilitarised and is the only monolingually Swedish-speaking region in Finland. It is the smallest region of Finland, constituting 0.49% of its land area and 0.50% of its population.)