Die AMIGA wird wieder segeln.
Nach fast sieben Jahren Solomon Islands, vielen neuen Freunden, vielen neuen Erfahrungen, ergreift mich nun doch wieder das Segel-Fieber.
Wer jetzt denkt, dass ich endlich die Reise, wie ursprünglich in 2019 geplant, nach Südostasien fortsetze? Nein. Es geht zurück. Richtung Vanuatu, Neukaledonien, möglicherweise Fiji und Neuseeland.
Die Gründe hierfür sind vielfältig. Der wichtigste Grund ist, dass die Amiga dringend für die Rumpf-Pflege einmal aus dem Wasser muss und es in den Solomons dafür keine Möglichkeiten mehr gibt, nachdem die kleine Marina in Liapari nicht mehr instand gehalten und nur rudimentär betrieben wird.
Ein guter Ort für einen Haulout mit einem Travel-Lift ist Noumea, Neukaledonien und somit primäres Reiseziel.
Zur Zeit ist alles nur Planung und Vorbereitung.
Dazu gehört es, Crew zu suchen und zu finden, denn ich habe keine Lust allein zu segeln. Es gibt auch schon eine verbindliche Zusage eines Australiers, der auch gewillt ist, bei den anfallenden Bootsaufgaben mitzuarbeiten. Auch freue ich mich, dass das Kompetenz-Zentrum Hamburg, namentlich Henning, als virtuelle Reisebegleitung und Wetter-Berater wieder dabei sein wird. Ohne ihn würde es nur halb so viel Freude machen.
Im Moment genieße ich noch etwas Zivilisation in Whangarei, Neuseeland. Einkaufen, was ich einkaufen möchte. Zeit mit alten und neuen Freunden verbringen. Heiß zu duschen und morgens kalte Füße haben. Ich musste mir tatsächlich erst einmal Hausschuhe kaufen, um damit umzugehen.
Nach fast sieben Jahren ohne größere Strecken wird es erst einmal wieder eine Herausforderung. Ich weiss, ich werde nervös sein, bis ich weiss und merke, dass alles gut läuft.
Vor drei Jahren habe ich einmal ein Interview zum Thema Resilienz gegeben.
Damals ging es um all das, was so gar nicht gut gelaufen war. Das alles, wenn ich es jetzt so lese, ist schon fast vergessen. Meine Güte – da kann ich nur die Daumen drücken, dass auf meiner kommenden Reise alles gut geht (lol).
Briefly describe highlights of your sailing resume.
In 2014 there have been many changes in my life and I had decided to take my future in a new direction without knowing what it should be. When I was young I used to sail with friends and even spent a sailing vacation on the Baltic Sea.
When someone invited me to sail on his boat for a weekend in July 2014, I just did it. This brought me into contact with the topic of “Bluewater Sailing” and circumnavigation. Something I had never imagined before. I booked a sailing course because I actually had no real idea about sailing.
Through the internet I found a boat in Argentina (he found me) and started a new life at sea. We circumnavigated South America, crossed the Pacific up to the Marquesas, Tuamotos, Societies, Tonga and New Zealand.
There were no special highlights for me on this trip because every single day was a highlight itself. It was unbelievable, even my seasickness couldn’t put me off.
In the years that followed I visited Tonga, Samoa, Wallis, Fortuna, Fiji, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Australia and New Zealand several times and got stuck in the Solomon Islands due to the Corona restrictions from 2019 on.
In May 2017 I had bought my own boat, on which I have been traveling ever since and which is my home.
Where is your home port?
Germany, Laboe in Schleswig-Holstein
What is your boat name, make and model?
My boat is not a special brand. It was advertised as Aera 43, steel ketch, 13,7 LOA. It’s built in 1988 on a French boatyard and the first owner did design it and built the interior. So this boat in absolutely unique. When I bought her in 2017 I changed the boat name to AMIGA, the Spanish word for girlfriend.
Briefly give a description of your most difficult and frightening sailing experience.
The most difficult thing after buying the boat was probably becoming a captain, since I had only crewed before. I know I don’t really have leadership skills. When I hired my crew for the trip from New Zealand to Tonga in May 2018, I first had to overcome the inner hurdle of taking on a new role and doing so without showing any weaknesses. I had to be the leader of the pack.
Location, type of event, course of action?
I had sailed the route from New Zealand to Tonga on another boat two years earlier. Now on my own boat everything went wrong from the start.
It started with the mainsail not lifting after clearing in Marsden Cove, NZ. That’s why I decided first of all to go to a wind-protected bay to try it there in peace and quiet.
After that was done we had to go around the cape and had ever increasing waves right on the bow. The largest ran over the entire deck under the sprayhood into the cockpit, where the water took a while to drain off again. The predicted wind of 20 knots raised up to 30 knots and overnight to 42 knots.
The first three days the wind fluctuated between 30 and 40 knots, which was not predicted at all. I had two men on board as crew whom I didn’t really know and didn’t really know if I could rely on them.
The course was close to the wind and as a result we continued to get a lot of water. Downstairs in the bathroom I noticed at some point that water was floating up the wooden floorboards and at the same time I got a shower from above with the next wave. A newly installed hatch was leaking. The bilge pump initially corrected the problem somewhat, but then it seemed to stop working.
On the first day I tried to send messages and get weather data via the Iridium-to-Go. The device went into an endless initialization, but was not ready to send. In Marsden Cove everything had worked perfectly. That was the point at which I considered turning back as we would have no contact with the outside world. In a real distress situation there was only the EPIRB to call for help, as the range of the VHF radio was also very limited.
The deck looked like it had been thrown – shekels of the flexible backstay had been lost leaving the stay flying free in the wind, the deck locker and liferaft had shifted and found a new location.
Preparing hot food was impossible. Half of crew member Ben’s berth was also wet because another hatch was leaking. But he didn’t want to move to the dry berth in the stern and was instead in waterproof sailing pants.
With a rumble in my stomach I decided to sail on. I couldn’t change the weather and based on the 10-day forecast, I reckoned that it would get better after 3-4 days.
Hopefully a friend in Hamburg was able to follow us on marine traffic without a message due to the AIS signal.
The 150-200 liters of water in the bilge won’t sink my boat.
As long as nothing went overboard and just slid around on deck, it could be reattached when it was calmer.
„Nobody leaves the cockpit unless there is a second person with them“ was an instruction I had given out before.
The worst was simply being incommunicado and I felt cut off and on my own, which was less about myself and more about the responsibility I had taken on for the two people on board with me. Maybe her life depended on my decisions.
We needed a total of 9 days and 10 hours for the distance of 1,360 nm and reached the anchorage in Tonga safe and in a good mood at 10.00pm in the evening.
Did you ever have a moment where you questioned whether or not you would sail again? Can you describe it please?
Yes. I had. In March 2015, when I had only been on the water for two months. At that time I was still on another boat in Patagonia. We had a broken refrigerator and no heating at outside temperatures of 3-12°. At the time I thought it would never get warm again. That day we wanted to sail out onto the Pacific and around a peninsula, then further north into the Darwin Channel.
The weather forecast was not really favorable in my opinion. We cruised against more than 25 knots of wind and 5 meters of swell with additional waves building up. My captain said that the boat must be able to withstand it. That’s what it’s made for. I felt more and more uncomfortable and with every hard crashing impact of the boat I slowly felt how panic was spreading in me. That was the moment when I considered whether I had really done the right thing by giving up my life in Germany and embarking on the unknown adventure of „sailing“.
What made you decide to sail again?
At that time we turned around after another 10 minutes and sailed into a sheltered bay to wait during the next days for a better weather window. There I discovered that a stay had broken during this action and my captain did not inform me about it. My most important insight from this was that in the future I could rely on my gut feeling and not on my captain. After that, I didn’t think about giving up sailing again, but kept a close eye on his decisions.
What was it that made you feel you could do this again?
It’s the inner power I felt, the oneness with the boat and the elements, the wind and the sea, the sun, the clouds and the rain.
To live exclusively in the moment when there is no room for anything else.
On your first big sail after the event, what was your mindset?
I was surprised at how much I learned by observing the first two years I sailed on the other boat. The captain had not actively taught me much during this time and I wasn’t allowed to do a lot because he didn’t think I would have done it right. Nevertheless, a lot is deeply anchored in me and I often act without thinking and only recognise afterwards that I know much more than I realize.
During the 9 days to Tonga I have become even more one with my boot and I trust my AMIGA and therefore myself.
Was there any particular phrase you told yourself to encourage or calm yourself?
Yes, there is. Whenever I’m on the go. It might be a kind of prayer.
„Dear universe, protect me and protect this boat“.
This article is focusing more on resilience after a big shakeup rather than action during the event. How do you define resilience?
To be honest, I had to google this word first. One of the things I found was this
The 7 pillars of resilience include optimism, acceptance, solution orientation, leaving the victim role, a success network, positive future planning and self-reflection
I think most of this applies to me. I have a generally positive outlook on life when I have experienced and gone through real and severe lows in my life, which includes getting diagnosed with Cancer in 2009.
I can accept situations I cannot change and make the best of them. Anyway, I’m the type of woman who doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about a mistake was made, for example, but how it can be done better in the future. On a sailing boat, it becomes a matter of choice to find solutions to all sorts of problems, because there isn’t always help or a shop nearby to fix them.
However, I have never seen myself in a victim role. Maybe I’ve been a victim. Surely I could have been called a victim at times in my life, maybe. For me the term includes „being defenseless“. But I’m more of a defensive person. I hit back out of reflex. On the other hand, I avoid situations that I consider too risky, unless there is no other option.
I’ve actually never seen myself as a networker, because I can do quite well without too many other people. When in doubt, I’m even enough for myself.
A positive future plan. Planning for the future is one of those things that have become less and less important to me. When I decided to go sailing and live on the sea 8 years ago, the longest time I could think about the future was about two months. After that there was nothing, blockage, emptiness. I’ve now reached about 5 years, although I’m aware that it’s „only“ a plan that can change at any time.
Everything seems to come down to “wait and see” because there is so much that we ultimately have no control over. Having direction and fundamental decisions is good and important, but it doesn’t kill me when things go differently, as long as I’m happy about it.
The main thing I took with me from that trip was that I can trust myself to do much more than I had previously thought. A lot of qualities came to the fore that I wasn’t even aware of before. I was able to steer a sailboat through heavy weather, take responsibility, give clear instructions, assess and evaluate situations, make decisions and at the same time make my crew feel safe and not at their mercy.
And also the confidence to sail my boat single-handed. In the same year I sailed the 9 days solo from New Caledonia back to New Zealand.
