CHAPTER 1

The End of a Voyage – The Beginning of a Voyage

It was June 5, 1996 and our sailing vessel LUDUS AMORIS had just finished her trip around the world. We were dropping her anchor in the Bay of Nidri just outside of the Greek town of Levkas in the Ionian Sea. I watched my wife Maria as she steered our boat expertly to a safe spot in the anchorage. The spot was just the right distance from the other numerous yachts that peppered this Mediterranean gem.

The chain thundered out of its locker and the anchor dropped 30 feet to the bottom. Standing on the foredeck of our LUDUS AMORIS, a Hallberg Rassy Rasmus 35, I watched as the chain stretched and tightened. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a little yacht approaching. As it neared us I recognized Wolfgang and Hanna on the deck of MELUSINE yelling “Welcome back home!” in exactly the same spot where they had said their goodbyes to us five years earlier. In an uncanny foreshadowing of our future sailing life, our neighbors pointed towards a shipyard and Wolfgang called out “Over there on the hardstand is your dream boat!” We looked towards the shipyard where dozens of yachts were supported on wooden joists, high above the gravel. Smiling and waving we called back “Let us arrive first!”

Quietly, Maria and I sat down in the cockpit. Only now did we become acutely aware that a period of our lives was over. Five years of travel and experiences that we were blessed to have had, had come to an end. When we left five years earlier, I was a teacher in a public college and university. It was easy for me to get the time off. The budget was tight and I was able to take an extended sabbatical. Maria, employed as a music teacher, was not able to take time off. She left her job with the understanding that she would be rehired when we returned. Unfortunately, the promise wasn’t kept through no fault of the employer. When we came back the public cash boxes were empty and nobody was hiring in Maria’s field.

Although our situation was dire, it didn’t bother us too much because we were still caught up in that other world in which we had lived for the past five years. It was a world of freedom, a world which by its nature required us to be self-sufficient and to be leaders. In this world, we were freed from being told how to live, what decisions to make and where to turn next. Along with this freedom came great responsibility. We were cognizant that we had no safety net and that we alone would carry the weight of our mistakes. Any sloppy navigation, careless handling of our ship or negligent use of our limited financial means could turn into a life threatening burden since we did not have a fall back plan while living on the water. We learned quickly how to survive through the unknown and after five years we had become experts out of necessity. We learned that freedom always comes with a price. This kind of sailing is rewarding, but it is also a very tough teacher.

What was it about Wolfgang’s mention of our dream boat that stuck in our mind? Why did we march to the shipyard just a couple of days later to have a look? Did we not have enough of sailing? Was our hunger for sailing not satisfied for the moment?

None the less we took this irrational step which at once gave our lives a new and unplanned direction. We had heard and read about a “virus” that inhabits your body and never leaves. It may lie dormant for a while, but it will always prevail. Sailing literature is full of examples of those with the “virus” - Wilfried Erdmann, Bernard Pieske, Rollo Gebhard, Ernst Juergen and Elga Koch, Bernard Moitessier, Eric Tabarly and Eric Hiscock, just to name a few. The list is endless and is an eloquent testimony to how this “virus” lives in the blood. In our case, we had firm plans. We would allow five years for the circumnavigation and when complete, we would reenter civilization as we had previously known it. Our lives would include a job or career, stress, insurance, phones, stop and go on the Autobahn and television. As I recall, this plan was never questioned, at least not during the first three years of our trip around the world. We were very certain of our life plan. At this “three year point” in our journey we first started to have doubts.

What did we actually want to do at home? Did we truly want to go back into the mundane mess of duties, projects, routines and weariness? These questions started to come up more and more the closer we came to the end of our sailing trip. Our seemingly firm plans started to look negotiable but with an illness in our family, our immediate fate had been decided and we could not, nor did we want to, escape the responsibility we had to our family.

The ship that Wolfgang had pointed out to us in Nidri on the day of our return was a Hallberg Rassy 41 from 1978. We recognized it at once as a great cruising yacht. As we had a closer look, it was obvious that the ketch had considerable deficiencies because of her age. The engine, a Volvo MD 21A, was familiar to us, as our ship, the LUDUS AMORIS, had the same model. Over 7000 engine hours had left their fingerprints on the engine. The teak deck was also familiar to us and we knew it was hopeless. It showed the same warping that had affected LUDUS AMORIS. Little glasses and plastic containers, strategically placed in the cabinets, gave us hints that we could not ignore. The teak deck was beyond repair and it was leaking all over. A spot at the bow made it obvious that this ship had touched rocks. The repair was an unprofessional one, but it wasn’t a substantial problem!

Our experiences over the past five years had given us the ability to expertly assess a yacht. Our first purchase was entirely different. With that purchase, we had no idea how to assess a ship and we were helpless and dependent on the honesty of the seller.

These are circumstances known to every novice, but we were no longer novices and we now had a clear vision of the conditions of a ship. This ship, considering her age of 19 years, was in very good shape, but 19 years cannot be underestimated. She would need considerable maintenance and repairs which would take a lot of effort and money. I quickly decided that this was too much work. Maria remained quiet on the matter. It was only the next morning that she confessed she liked the boat exceptionally well despite the manpower that she knew would need to be invested to make her seaworthy. Prior to leaving for Germany we asked for the name and address of the seller and then a day later we checked the boat once more with greater intensity. Our assessment was the same - she needed too much work and the price being asked was unacceptable given her condition.

We soon forgot the boat and the shipyard. We were too busy getting settled back into our house and back into our jobs. Very quickly we were caught up in the daily grind, the routine that we had lost sight of entirely for the past five years.

Sadly, but with relief, my mother passed away which brought years of suffering to an end. We were so lucky to have gotten back in time to spend precious moments with her before she left us. It was only six weeks after our return that she moved on. I am so grateful to my siblings who carried the responsibility of her care during our absence.

Only with their understanding and agreement was it possible for us to carry out our circumnavigation.

With my mother gone, we began to realize that we had no good reason to give up our treasured nautical life permanently. For this reason, I made contact with the seller of the HR 41. The owner was a German widow who for three years since her husband’s passing had tried to sell the boat without success. She did not agree when we gave her our assessment of the yacht. I didn’t see any chance of agreement on price and so I made a low offer which angered her. To our surprise, two hours later she called back and accepted. We had barely arrived and merged back into life in Germany and suddenly we were planning our withdrawal. The fact that we had assimilated back into society was fine because it took us two full years to fulfill all of the requirements for our return to the boat and to our treasured sea life.

One day during the first of these two years our close friend Rainer came to visit. In passing he mentioned that he had an engine on the bed of his pickup truck. “Do you want it?” he asked. Rainer was a development engineer at the Mercedes automobile factory and on his truck was a brand new Diesel motor, a test motor Type OM 601 that was made out of aluminum. This was exactly what we needed to replace the worn out Volvo engine!

We quickly negotiated an agreement and within three days the motor was made seaworthy by a specialist near Bremen. A heat exchanger, Hurth gearbox, injection pump and many other little details changed the automobile motor into a yacht engine. It wasn’t that it was a great deal; we could have purchased a new Yanmar engine for the same money the conversion cost, but it was what it was and we were moving in the right direction.

During the Easter vacation of 1998 we carried the engine on a trailer to Greece and mounted it onto our ‘new’ boat. An AquaDrive – a flexible coupling between the gearbox and prop shaft – was responsible for a smooth run. In addition, the AquaDrive guaranteed that the propeller power was transferred to the hull by a thrust bearing and not to the silent blocks of the engine.

The following year we worked to replace the aging electronic devices. A new GPS, shortwave radio, echo sounder, radar and autopilot were installed. The sails had to be adjusted for the new roller furlers. Halyards...