Marc Bielefeld. The dream of sailing is above all else. Travelling with the wind, the scent of foreign harbours, a life on the water. Yes, the temptation is great to make this existence your main profession. In our individualised society, the motto "Live your dream! By contrast, Instagram, Tiktok and YouTube usually ignore the less colourful moments.
This is especially true for the profession that Anna Sult has dedicated herself to. She only discovered sailing late in life, during her studies. But she quickly realised: "This is it. A profession that is by no means all champagne sailing. This is because the field of charter and transfer cruises is barely regulated. Those involved here operate in a grey area - without professional representation, without regulated working hours and sometimes with at best casual compliance with applicable safety regulations.
Rainer Holtorff, who has been in the business for many years and makes a living from sailing, puts it this way: "Basically, we lead a shadowy existence. The scene is almost impossible to quantify. It ranges from holidaying university lecturers who occasionally work as skippers to professionals with a captain's licence and an engineering degree who look after a superyacht on a permanent basis for months or even years.
The clients are as diverse as the sailors themselves. Customers include sailing schools, shipyards, charter companies, travel agencies and owners who want to get their boats from A to B. It is not uncommon for yachts to be crewed spontaneously, with crews having to be thrown together in a hurry. The duration of the trip also varies: from a few days to months. The stages are correspondingly different. Sometimes you do Bornholm-Kiel, sometimes Martinique-Mallorca. Sailors who do not shy away from the responsibility of such trips are increasingly in demand.
Skippers who not only have all the necessary licences, but also the relevant experience. Psychologists could carry out interesting field research here and there. After all, a wide variety of characters come together on board: adventurers and normal people, millionaires and students, enthusiastic beginners and veteran saltbuckets. And then a trip like this can end in an experiment. Because even if there are countless wonderful moments at sea and these usually outweigh the others: Time and again, there are also rumours of trouble on board, mutinies and interpersonal tensions.
