DEATH ANNOUNCEMENT
BERTIL GUNNAR KARLSSON
“Berra”
9 February 1944 – 26 August 2023
Lysekil trawler skipper, sea rescue volunteer and a man who forecast fog with his knee
Bertil Karlsson did not own a watch. He owned a tide table, a barometer he tapped like an old friend, and a left knee that could forecast fog three hours before the radio. In sixty years on the water off Bohuslän he was never once caught out.
Born in 1944 on the island of Smögen, the son of a herring fisherman, Bertil went to sea at fifteen as a deckhand on a boat called Ebba, and earned his skipper's certificate at the fisheries school in Lysekil at twenty-three. In 1972 he bought his own trawler, the Ebba Maria, with a bank loan, his father's blessing and a promise to his fiancée that he would be home for Midsummer. He was, nearly every year. For thirty-six years he fished shrimp, herring and mackerel in the Skagerrak, and when the cod collapsed in the nineties he kept his crew employed by switching to Norway lobster.
He was also a volunteer with the Swedish Sea Rescue Society for forty years, and was called out on stormy nights more often than he counted. In 2005 he was awarded the Society's silver badge and wore it, at the insistence of his wife Ingegerd, for precisely one afternoon.
He married Ingegerd in 1968 and they raised Anders and Helena in a red wooden house above the harbour, where the kitchen smelled of boiled shrimp and coffee, and where every August the whole family and half the town sat down to a kräftskiva, with crayfish, paper hats and songs. Bertil led the singing, badly. Their son Anders, an engineer at Volvo in Gothenburg, would arrive with a new car every few years; Bertil admired it and went on driving his old one the nine hundred metres to the harbour. A lifelong IFK Göteborg supporter, he listened to matches on deck with the engine off.
He retired in 2008 and spent his days mending nets he would never use again and giving advice that nobody asked for and everybody took. Bertil died on 26 August 2023 at home in Lysekil, a few days after the last crayfish party of the summer, with Ingegerd and his children beside him. He leaves Ingegerd, Anders, Helena and five grandchildren.
“The sea is honest. Be honest back.”