There is a reed boat originating from Bolivia, South America, in the museum. The boat was made in 2008 by Demetrio Limachi on the Lake Titicaca, which is located 3800 m above the sea level. Li ...
There is a reed boat originating from Bolivia, South America, in the museum. The boat was made in 2008 by Demetrio Limachi on the Lake Titicaca, which is located 3800 m above the sea level. Limachi also participated in the building of the reed boat Ra II, which took the Norwegian folklorist Thor Heyerdahl over the Atlantic in 1970. With this journey Heyerdahl proved, that ancient sailors were also capable of crossing the Atlantic.
The Kvarken Boat Museum is the largest boat museum in Finland, and it exhibits Ostrobothnian utility boats from the years 1820-1993. In addition to boats and fishing equipment the museums displays seal hunting, timber rafting and islander life.
The museum is located in the Malax river delta, in a nationally valuable cultural landscape, and the nearby shores are surrounded by traditional boathouses.
The museum has 92 utility boats and around 3 000 listed objects, which are connected to fishing, sealing, timber rafting and islander life. Over 130 various boat engines and four snowmobiles and predecessors of snowmobiles, various “speed sleds”, demonstrate the technical development of maritime life. In addition the museum has a vast picture collection of old boat photographs and drawings.
The majority of the boats in the museum are wooden, but there are also boats made of newer materials, such as aluminium, fiberglass and mahogany. There are many rarities among the boats – one of them Zacharias Topelius’ green dinghy called “Gröngölingen” from the 19th century. Two of the oldest boats in the museum are the small boat, which used to belong to the Riska family, built in Larsmo in 1850, and Paul Stoor’s dinghy called “Korpen” from Malax. Korpen probably originates from the 1820s. The youngest boat in the museum is the sailing dinghy “Älvan”, which was built in Nykarleby in 1993 on the model of a dinghy from Malax.
There are also boats caved from a single stem of wood originating from different parts of Ostrobothnia on display in the museum. The bottom boards of a dugout discovered in the 1960s in a Lappfjärd swamp have been dendrochronologically timed to the year 1774, i.e. the tree has been chopped down that year.
The items, the boats and the engines are on view in the 12 buildings on the area: the boat hall, the seal boat house where sealing is being displayed, the herring boat house where catching of herring is being displayed, the engine house, the net house, the fisherman’s cottage, the dugout house, the log house where shipbuilding and winter fishing are being displayed, the rafting shed and the other exhibition halls.
The Boat Day is an annually occurring event; it is arranged on a Saturday in June. There is a volunteering evening (with coffee served) every Thursday at 6 p.m., from the beginning of May to the middle of September. Various theme exhibitions are also arranged during the summer.
