About Us
Serving the World from Richmond, California, USA
Behind the Monitor factory is a staff of dedicated employees who know that quality and service are the most important ingredients for a company that deals with cruising sailors. We specialize only in windvane self-steering. Hans Bernwall, the owner of Scanmar Internnational, is a circumnavigator. Having actually sailed the oceans, he can speak from hands on experience and not just from theory. He personally knows how important it is for sailors to be able to contact the factory that produces the equipment so vital to safe and pleasant, short handed ocean cruising. Prompt customer service has the highest priority and because of the size of the company we will always have people on call. From experience we know that this can be difficult for smaller companies during boat shows, sickness or vacation. We also appreciate how irritating it can be to finally get through on an expensive international call, only to be confronted with an answering machine!
By selling directly to the customer we can ensure expertise and maintain a lower price. For customers that prefer
to deal with "the local fellow" we would like to point out that "the local fellow" is only local till you leave your home port. You would also pay more. When you are sailing the seven seas, nobody has better motivation to give the customer the best service in the world than the Monitor factory.
The Monitor comes with a 3-year warranty, plus our guarantee that our warranty is as good as our reputation.
Hans Bernwall, President of Scanmar and the King of Windvanes, has his domain upstairs in our loft-like space where he ponders and snoozes. He is also available for technical questions and jokes. This is the fellow you will meet at the boat shows, from London to St. Pete. Check out his story of the beginnings of Scanmar.
Kopi Carmine is the newest addition to our office staff at Scanmar. Kopi has lived aboard and cruised for nearly 35 years, raised her son aboard, and understands the difficulties of getting parts in foreign lands. She brings to us her customer service experience with several marine related businesses and will be able to help you with whatever your self-steering needs may be.
Emmy Newbould left Scanmar after serving three years as "the Voice of Scanmar". She answered all our calls and emails and was the font of windvane knowledge for our customers. She and her husband Eric Willbur are now heading out to Central America and the Southwest Pacific on their Flying Dutchman 37 "Nataraja". Keep an eye out for their yellow-hulled boat - she's now our "ambassador at sea"!
Ron Geick is the engineering and technical drawing wizard who fits the Monitor to your specific boat. Ron is also our parts expert, maintains our drawing & photo database, and updates our website.
Scanmar is open year round, 9-5 Monday through Friday Pacific Standard Time. We are always here to answer your questions, and we respond immediately to your long distance calls for spare parts. We know what its like to be stranded in paradise.
Our completely reconditioned building is 6500 sq. ft. and we have the factory, showroom and sales office all on the premises.
How It All Started
VOLUME 99, SEPTEMBER 1985
HANS AND CARL
At first glance, the male bonding between Carl Seipel 42, and Hans Bernwall 46, is not immediately apparent. Carl is tall and serious, with greenish-brown eyes, while Hans is blonde, blue eyed and more elfin in nature. Theirs is not a sexual relationship, but put them in the same room, or better yet on a boat anywhere in the world, and their connection begins to reveal itself.
The first hint that the two share any sort of common heritage is their Swedish accent. Both were born, raised and educated in the Land of the Midnight Sun, and both gladly gave up that region of the world for life in a warmer, gentler climate. Since they've become friends, they've shared years of partnership, first in a 40 ft. cutter in which they circumnavigated. For the past eight years they've been the principals in Scanmar Marine, the Sausalito vendors of self-steering gear.
They met in Berkeley in 1968. Hans had come to the States as a 22-year-old business graduate looking for opportunity. Starting as an envelope licker in a local office of Facit, a Swedish office equipment manufacturer, he had worked his way up to district sales manager. He was enjoying success California style with one house in Tiburon, another in Tahoe, plenty of skiing and a half interest in a 22-ft Star boat which he raced actively.
Carl, meanwhile, had been earning his Ph.D. in economics in Stockholm. With a scholarship from the Royal Academy of Science, he came to Berkeley, but his research into consumer behavior suffered in the face of more weighty matters; like girls and skiing and partying. It was at one of the latter that he met Hans, and a bit later they bumped into each other in a ski line. Carl stayed at Hans' Tahoe house and volunteered to cook at one point. "He was really impressed that I put the chicken inside the oven to bake it," recalls Carl. "I think that may have influenced him when he asked me to sail around the world."
The actual request didn't come until a few months later. In the fall of 1969, Carl transferred to Michigan's Institute for Survey Research, a place he unfortunately found much like Sweden. At the same time Hans was undergoing what he calls an early midlife crisis. "I was just collecting things", he says.
Acting on his "male intuition", Hans called Carl in early December and told him he was going to sail around the world. They had only seen each other three times, but Carl felt it was a serious proposal. Flying away from cold, snowy Michigan reminded Carl of leaving Sweden. Being greeted by sun and warmth in California helped make the decision easy, even though he became, in the eyes of his professional colleagues, "a flake overnight".
By selling most of their worldly holdings, including real estate for Hans and stocks for Carl, the pair put together enough to buy a wooden 40-ft Alden cutter which had been built in 1936. They rented a one room apartment in Sausalito and set about fitting out, a process Hans felt took forever but actually only lasted five months. "It turns out that was fast compared to many others," he says now.
Having never been to sea before, neither knew quite what to expect. They were advised, however, that once beyond the Golden Gate they would absolutely need a self-steering device. "I didn't believe it at first," recalls Carl. The whole concept of such a device was still novel at the time, and great strides in self-steering technology have been made since. Carl and Hans still find, though, that Ômissionary work', i.e. convincing people that they really need something to steer the boat besides human beings, is a large part of their business.
"Once you trust the device," says Hans, "you can relax, you can stay in the cabin if it's nasty out, you can navigate and you can do all sorts of things which are more productive than sit there and steer the boat. Still, people will spend eight years getting ready to go cruising and then come to us with three weeks left and want to put on a self steering rig.
For Fia, the Alden 40, Hans and Carl built their own vane based on one invented by British singlehanded sailor Blondie Hasler. Hasler realized a simple windvane wasn't powerful enough to control the boat's tiller, so he rigged it instead to an oar hanging in the water off the stern. With the boat on course, the vane was pointed into the wind. If the hull deviated from the correct heading, the vane responded, turning the oar's blade and causing it to swing out away from the boat's centerline. Trim lines from the oar to the tiller or wheel then corrected the heading and the oar came back to its original, vertical position.
Unfortunately, Hans and Carl found out their self-steerer wouldn't work after leaving San Francisco in November of 1970. Heading south to San Diego, they consulted the local experts at each stop, but none of them could pinpoint the problem. The night before they were scheduled to leave San Diego, "which is when you cut the umbilical cord" notes Hans, they noticed a boat coming into the dock nearby. Seeing the name Magic Dragon on the stern, they quickly ran to take the yacht's line and help her tie up.
The reason for all the excitement was that Hans and Carl knew Michel DeRidder, skipper of the Magic Dragon, was the one person who could solve their problem. They were right. The next morning, Michel showed them exactly what was wrong and how to fix it. "It will work," he told them simply. Fia's departure was delayed a week while the two Swedes junked their original version and completed the new model. Once they got out to sea, they were pleased with the new rig and radioed back to Magic Dragon with their deep thanks.
"It eventually cost us about $3,000," says Hans, "and that was in 1970 before inflation hit! Some people tell us now that they want to build their own self-steering device and we can only tell them that at best it will turn out to be a prototype!"
The adventures of Fia's crew would fill a volume in itself. The young sailors had more than their share of adventure, starting with their two month stay in the Galapagos Islands. From there they traveled on to the South Pacific. Motoring through a pass near Moorea with two lovely native lasses, their 19-year-old Gray Marine engine died and they found themselves essentially stuck in Tahiti. By now their funds had run out and they had to fend for themselves.
"We both had the worst backgrounds to go out sailing," says Hans. "We had been professional bullshitters and had not skills such as carpentry, mechanics or welding." They did whatever they could, from exterminating termites to assembling furniture. Their steadiest income came from writing and recording interviews for magazines and radio stations in Sweden. Two of their most memorable subjects were Christian Barnard, the famous heart transplant surgeon from South Africa, and Tom Neale, the 70 year old hermit from New Zealand they found living happily on a small island between Tahiti and Samoa.
Hans and Carl also learned to live by their wits. Their dead engine was eventually replaced by a new Volvo diesel with a hydraulic drive, courtesy of the chairman of the company. He had been strolling down the quay when he spotted the Swedish flag on Fia. Hans offered him an early morning whiskey and the rest took care of itself.
Heading west across the Indian Ocean, the boat began to show serious signs of wear. They had been out to sea almost four years and in the strong trades they were alarmed to find the lower shrouds had given way on the leeward side. They jury-rigged and limped into Diego Garcia, an island south of India. The U.S. Navy was building a large base there at the time, though, so they kept going to the Seychelles, where they arrived with just $80.00 in the ship's kitty.
"We had some booze," recalls Carl, "so we invested our money in cocktail mix and peanuts and just started partying." Their nautical version of networking resulted in Carl being hired as the manager of the local Lindblatt travel agency. His first - and only - act was to hire Hans as the captain of the company's 123-ft charter schooner. Carl then retired to working on Fia while Hans spent the next 10 months sailing over 8,000 miles on a succession of one week cruises. "I learned that I never wanted to again be a charter boat captain," he says now.
There were other facets to the trip as well. After the Seychelles, they went to South Africa. While the people were incredibly friendly, it was very difficult to be there with any kind of conscience. The conditions under which the non-whites lived were appalling, and the whites were visibly uncomfortable talking about "the problem". Carl also noted that he had never seen so many large ferro cement boats under construction in backyards as he did in South Africa. Even 15 years ago, there was the feeling that you might have to get out and take everything with you.
And there were the good times too. For the two young, attractive males, there was not shortage of female attention. They even found what they consider a true earthly paradise, an island filled with women aching for male companionship.(Their menfolk must travel at length to find work of any kind.) Our heros did what they could to keep everyone smiling, and after three weeks they barely had enough strength to weigh anchor. Both are reluctant to identify this Shangri La, fantasizing that one day they'll retire there!
Finally, on Memorial Day of 1976, Fia sailed back under the Golden Gate Bridge. Just as they had been shocked by life at sea, returning to civilization was a harsh transition. "We had to buy shoes," says Carl "and that was very depressing." They also purchased a 1956 Pontiac for $150 which looked so terrible, they say, hitchhikers would pull in their thumbs when they saw them coming!
For Carl, the urge to return to sea was very strong, but he knew if he spent another five years away from civilization he'd be a vagabond forever. They both wanted to establish an economic base from which to operate, and Hans was able to score a position selling Silva compasses from Sweden. Carl joined him, and then a friend offered them a dealership for Sailomat self-steering gear.
They were reluctant at first. They didn't think the vane was as well sea tested as it could have been. On the other hand, they saw that the market for such devices was wide open for the taking. "We knew that every cruising boat needs one," says Hans, "and from what we had seen on our trip, most boats either didn't have one or had one that didn't work too well." So in 1978, they took on the Sailomat line.
Operating out of their storefront in Sausalito's Clipper Harbor, Hans and Carl began to experience success. In 1980 they switched products, buying the tooling and rights to manufacture Monitor windvanes, a Southern California rig made almost totally of stainless steel to prevent the corrosion often found in vanes of mixed metals. Scanmar enjoyed increasing success in the following years, and they are about to celebrate the production of the 1,000th Monitor. This spring they also added the Saye's Rig, a vane using a trim tab on the rudder. They also imported the Navik wind vane from France for boats under 30-ft long.
"We've found you can't force one type of vane on all boats," says Hans. "Each one has a different stern, a different afterdeck, and different sailing characteristics." Although many consider them a local business, Hans estimates they are the largest self-steering device supplier in the U.S., and only 10% to 15% of their business is here in Northern California. "We're almost a mail order outfit!" he says.
Besides the previously mentioned problem of making cruisers realize that they need a self steering device, the Scanmar pair say that both the installation and operation of their equipment (which hasn't had a price rise since 1981) can be challenging. Mounting a large, bulky vane and oar on the stern, (sometimes directly over the boat's name, heaven forbid!) requires a 30 page manual and sometimes personal attention. Carl and Hans know that service is their biggest asset. Carl once flew to Hawaii at his own expense to straighten out one customer who claimed the gear didn't work on the trip over from California. "It took five minutes to fix it," he says, "but if we hadn't done it, he would have bad rapped us for the next ten years."
There have been some smashing successes for Scanmar too. Seattle's Mark Schrader used a Monitor during his 27,000, nine month circumnavigation around the five great capes of the Southern Ocean on a Valiant 40 in 1982-83. Mark brought the vane to the Seattle Boat Show after the trip and Hans simply polished it a little and put it on display. Showgoers thought it was brand new. Other notables who've used a Monitor are circumnavigator Andrew Urbanczyk, grandmother Alice Hager, who singlehanded non-stop from S.F. to Japan in 1984, and blind sailor Hank Dekker, who soloed to Hawaii on his sloop Dark Star. Singlehanded TransPac winner Mark Rudiger had a Navik system onboard on his 29-ft Shadowfox last year, too.
Civilized life has not only brought Hans and Carl some measure of success, but also steady living partners. Carl married a fellow Swede shortly after returning from the trip, and Hans has been living with his girlfriend for almost seven years. They still don't consider themselves completely domesticated, though. Carl has one tie, which he wears only when forced to, and Hans finds his old narrow ties are back in fashion, obviating the need for any new ones. And now that they've established that financial base they knew they needed, it's not out of the question that they'll go back to sea. Getting used to not wearing shoes again wouldn't be hard to do.
Shimon Van Collie -- latitude 38
In order to pursue other goals, Carl sold his half of the business to Hans in May 1987, and Hans is now the sole owner of Scanmar International.