On February 10, the sail training ship “Gorch Fock” of the German Navy set sail from its home port of Kiel on its 182nd foreign training voyage (AAR). Under the command of frigate captain Elmar Bornkessel, the voyage is initially heading south without the junior officers. They will continue via Vigo (Spain) and Portimao (Portugal) to Funchal on Madeira and Horta and Ponta Delgada on the Azores. The last foreign port on this voyage will be Lerwick (Great Britain) before the ship arrives in Kiel on June 25 for the Kieler Woche windjammer parade.
Around 250 naval officer cadets from Crew 2024 will gain their first experience on board the tall ship as part of their basic maritime training. Among them are cadets from Cameroon, Tunisia, Colombia, Senegal, Togo, Ghana, the Republic of Korea and Iraq. On board the sail training ship, the course participants learn the basic nautical skills. They experience the importance of teamwork and camaraderie in practice before moving on to the academic part of their training at the Bundeswehr universities in Hamburg and Munich.
“Our aim is to create positive experiences with seafaring in addition to achieving the training objectives. It would be great if everyone could experience the joy of seafaring and camaraderie. If we manage to do that and everyone returns safe and sound, it will have been a successful voyage,” says the commander.
To the ship
The “Gorch Fock” is the oldest ship in service in the German Navy and is primarily used for training. Since its commissioning in December 1958, around 16,000 officer and non-commissioned officer candidates have been trained on the planks of this barque. In the course of her training voyages, she has visited around 400 ports in almost 60 countries on five continents, covering more than 770,000 nautical miles, the equivalent of 35 circumnavigations of the globe.
In addition, the “Gorch Fock” is a true Hamburg native, as she was built by Blohm+Voss in 1958 and shortly afterwards became the first sponsored ship of the Hanseatic City of Hamburg.
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