A Wisconsin Dad Won Custody of a Remote Swedish Island. Now He Just Has to Get There.
Eric Holmer woke his wife at 5 a.m. on her birthday with a strange announcement: they were now the caretakers of a tiny island in the Baltic Sea. The 42-year-old from Madison had entered a contest run by Visit Sweden called “Your Swedish Island,” which drew more than 2,200 video applications from 100 countries. In May, the tourism board chose five winners—from Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the U.S.—to steward remote, uninhabited islands for a year. Holmer, the lone American, had never even been to Sweden.
He first heard about the competition on the radio while driving his son to a swim meet. The family name, Holmer, means “Islander” in Swedish. That felt like a sign. “How many people in the world have that connection?” he figured they had a real chance. They did.
His prize: Skötbådan, a granite outcropping in the northern Stockholm Archipelago with smooth cliffs, seabirds, and open horizons. There’s no electricity, plumbing, or Wi-Fi. There’s also a catch. When local Swedish news covered his win, the headline read, roughly: “Eric Holmer is very excited about this island, but locals say it’s not much of an honor.” Depending on the wind, the island is nearly impossible to reach—maybe by kayak—and serves mainly as a training spot for Navy divers.
His wife, Jen, has already said she’ll stay on shore. But Holmer is determined to at least set foot there. He’s turned to Reddit for advice, and locals have offered navigation tips and even a boat ride.
The family—three kids ages 8 to 13—heads to Sweden in late August. Getting ready required an emergency trip to the post office: all five passports had expired. The two-week trip is also a chance to trace their roots. Holmer’s great-great-grandfather, a Lutheran pastor, left Sweden in 1888. The church where he was baptized, built in the 1600s, still stands. Holmer, now finishing a program at Duke Divinity School and on his way to becoming a pastor himself, wants to see it. His parents, who visited Sweden once in 2011, plan to meet them there. A childhood friend will be in Stockholm at the same time.
Visit Sweden asks winners to follow “Allemansrätten,” the right to roam freely while respecting nature. For Holmer, that philosophy fits his outlook: “Life is a gift, and you’re entrusted to take good care of it.” All he wants is to stand where his family came from and understand what that decision to leave meant. That is, if he can find a boat that handles the Baltic wind.