I recently came across a video of the Viking longship replica Saga Oseberg tacking across the wind. Before seeing the video I would have thought that the only way to tack a longship, to bring the wind from one side of the bow to the other, would be to drop the sail and pull out the oars. Obviously, I was wrong. The long slender ship, with a single square sail and off-center rudder, can indeed tack. What is even more remarkable is that she is sailing at all.
The original Oseberg ship is a well preserved Viking longship which was found in a burial mound on the Oseberg farm near Tønsberg, Norway in 1903. The reconstructed ship, believed to date from just after the year 800, is now in the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo. The Oseberg ship is different from other Viking ships excavated from burial mounds in that it has lower freeboard and less displacement. Some suggested that it was built not as a sailing ship but as simply a burial ship. This view was reinforced when a replica of the ship sank on its maiden voyage in 1988. The ship was refloated, only to sink again in 1992.
Nevertheless, some researchers believed that the original reconstruction of the ship was in error. While the Oseberg ship is the most complete Viking ship found to date, she was in over 200 pieces when she was excavated from the burial mound. Researchers believed that several mistakes had been made in reconstructing the ship, in particular that the stem was sloped too far forward. Subsequently, model testing of the modified ship was done at the model basin a the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, which demonstrated that the changes made the ship considerably more seaworthy. The full scale replica, seems to bear this out.
Below are three videos. The first shows the preliminary work and model testing done on the modified design of the ship. The second shows the replica sailing to windward, while the third shows the Oseberg replica tacking.
Saga Oseberg seglar bidevind / Viking ship replica Saga Oseberg sailing close hauled from eldahei on Vimeo.
Saga Oseberg stagvender / Viking ship replica Saga Oseberg tacking from eldahei on Vimeo.
Would love to see a polar diagram of her sailing performance.
I would too. My guess is that the longships can’t be even as close-winded as the square-riggers of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Actually we can work the Sae Hrafn, our current ship, about two points into the wind, which was about as good as a 19th century frigate could do. Of course, with the shallow “low aspect ratio” keel, you get more leeway; but plenty of square riggers had to drop the hook off of lee shores, too. We always have the option of breaking out the oars if we want to make progress directly to windward; and the great secret of Viking navigation was that they didn’t have to be back in the office Monday morning.
is she ever coming to the UK?