Sipoo Archipelago · Finland
Musta Hevonen
The Black Horse. A small island of granite and pine, set in the quiet blue between Helsinki and the open Baltic.
A Note on the Name
Musta Hevonen is Finnish for Black Horse. The old charts of the Sipoo skerries give a few origins. The favoured one: a dark granite outcrop on the eastern shore that, in low evening light, takes the shape of a horse drinking from the sea.
I. The Island
A small place,
quietly kept.
The Sipoo archipelago is a long, soft scattering of skerries east of Helsinki: brackish water, red granite, and the lean Scots pine that the Baltic seems to prefer over everything else. Musta Hevonen sits about midway through it, fifteen kilometres south-east of Vuosaari, on the western edge of the Sipoonselkä.
The island is small, a little under half a square kilometre, and has been left as nature made it. Granite shoulders. A jetty on the eastern point. A wooden main building and a sauna among the pines. A common stone pier at the northern corner where the ferry from Vuosaari and the old J. L. Runeberg to Porvoo can call by request.
The light here is the thing. From late May to mid August the sun barely touches the horizon, and the sea takes on that specific Finnish blue that is somewhere between slate and hammered silver. The granite holds heat well past sunset.
II. The Buildings
III. A Slow Week
Swim. Sail. Fish.
Walk the rocks. Sleep through the long light.
Swimming
The southern cove drops to four metres within a stroke. The water is cold in early June and forgiving by July. The shore is stony; better to swim from the sauna pier than from the rocks.
Sailing
The Sipoonselkä is generous water, wide enough for a long reach, sheltered enough that the small skerries do most of the work of taking the worst out of a wind. Folkbåts and gaff-rigged sloops, mostly.
Fishing
Pike and perch in the shallows, sea trout in the deeper channels. The brackish water of the Gulf of Finland makes for an unusual catch. There is a smoker behind the sauna.
IV. The Grass Court
A Wimbledon, kept by hand,
at sixty degrees north.
The championship court sits on a level shelf of meadow above the southern shore. It is one of the very few true grass courts in the Nordics, and the only one that anyone has heard of on a private island.
The turf is a perennial ryegrass and creeping fescue mix, cut at eight millimetres in the playing season and rolled twice a week. The lines are hand-marked in lime. The net posts are the original 1962 cast iron, repainted each May.
In winter the court is covered, the soil rests under snow, and the groundsman moves to other work. From the first week of June, it is mown into stripes that, from the air, look like the wake of a slow boat.
23.77 m
Court length
8 mm
Cut height
1962
Net posts
V. Summer Championship
Musta Hevonen
Summer Championship
2027
Thursday
9 July
Arrival
Boats arrive through the day. Welcome dinner at the harbour, with the long light behind it.
Friday
10 July
First round
Eight matches across the day. Cold lunches between rounds. Sauna at dusk.
Saturday
11 July
Quarter-finals
Four matches in the cool of the morning. Sailing in the afternoon for those still standing.
Sunday
12 July
Semi-finals
Two matches at noon. Cold smoked perch on the rocks. A long, light evening on the jetty.
Monday
13 July
Final
The final at three. Champagne and grass stains. Boats home at midnight under a low sun.
The championship has no spectators, no press, and no prize money. The winner is given a small silver horse and the use of the south guest cottage for one week the following summer.
VI. Klobbsund
A sheltered sound
on the western shore.
Klobbsund is the narrow water between Musta Hevonen and Svartshästklobben, the small unnamed knoll to its west. In Finland-Swedish, klobb is a rounded knoll of rock, and sund is the strait it makes with its neighbour.
The sound is a couple of hundred metres across at its widest and shelters the common stone pier on the north side of the island. Even when the open Sipoonselkä is grey and cross, the water in Klobbsund stays calm.
The grass court is a short walk up the bank from the sound. On a still afternoon you can hear the rallies from a boat in the channel, which is the most Musta Hevonen sound there is.
“In the archipelago, a week is a long time. A year is nothing. A grass court is forever.”
From a logbook kept on the island, July 1974.