Our relationship with the neighbouring Haapsalu Yacht Club ?
It’s complicated.
Before 2003, AS Haapsalu Jahtklubi (Haapsalu Yacht Club Ltd) operated the Haapsalu yachtharbour, owned by the company AS Lääne Kalur, but did it poorly and endangered several visiting yachts by that.Thus, the Haapsalu yachtharbour became the Grand Holm Marina and the Yacht Club ended up without its own harbour.
In 2004, AS Haapsalu Jahtklubi tried to sell the permanent concrete pier inside the Grand Holm Marina to the Grand Holm Marina, whereas they did not own the pier which was our property anyway. The pier is known as the Haapsalu guest pier, and they asked one million Estonian kroons for it. They threatened to cause problems if we refused to buy. And the problems started to come soon enough.
Unfortunately, several yachtsmen from Haapsalu joined this unlawful demand. As a gesture of solidarity with the blackmailers, they left the Grand Holm Marina pier (where they had moored for years) and started to attack the Grand Holm Marina with various false accusations.
Aivar Reivik, who later became the Commodore of the Haapsalu Yacht Club, rejected the call for a peace at Christmas and instead asked politicians outright to continue with the political measures already started against the Grand Holm Marina. These political measures included an attempt to reduce the basin granted to the Grand Holm Marina, which failed. These political measures also included fraud: falsifying national navigation information; the inaccurate positioning of Grand Holm Marina’s maritime coordinates in front of the Haapsalu Yacht Club; forging the visiting statistics of the Grand Holm Marina and applying these statistics to the yacht club, and so on.
The most disgusting thing of all is that the Grand Holm Marina was ordered to allow passage to the international border checkpoint, supposedly located at the yacht club and allegedly blocked by the Grand Holm Marina. A state committee run by the Maritime Administration came to Haapsalu and “established” the existence of a non-existent border checkpoint! There is no, and never has been, such checkpoint at the yacht club or at the Grand Holm Marina. It does not and will not ever exist.
Grand Holm Marina defended its rights in court for almost two years, and the authorities even lied to the court about the fake border checkpoint. It appeared that the Republic of Estonia – a member of the European Union and the Schengen Area – either does not know or does not want to know where its international border checkpoint is (or was) located. Manipulation with the border checkpoints of the Republic of Estonia should qualify as treason. It should be impossible and inadmissible to change the relevant laws during the trial. Alas, it is not.
By now, the Haapsalu Yacht Club has managed to built the new and its own marina (the Veskiviigi Marina), and we are happy to say that today there are no more attempts to force the Grand Holm Marina to buy something, or to sell our marina on the cheap.
The court did not validate the existence of an international checkpoint at the Haapsalu yacht club or else in the neigberhood. Instead of to continue the political measures, the new Veskiviigi marina has finally started to fulfil its obligations under the Ports Act and to mark and if really necessary even dredge their fairway – something that the Grand Holm Marina did in its basin a long time ago.
We wish all the best for the Veskiviigi marina and we hope to see not just political but dedicated to the yachting membership of the Haapsalu Yacht Club in the future. However, it is probably perfectly clear now, why our not the bestone and need to improve.
