33rd “Peter Gast Schiffahrtsregatta” 2015, sailing race event of the German Maritime Industry

The FleetMon team joined together with Llyod’s Register to attend and compete in the 33rd Peter Gast Schiffahrtsregatta, an event which started years ago with only a small number of friends taking part at this race.

Today competing against 120 vessels, and more than 1000 maritime shipping professionals from a starting location in Germany to Denmark. The event was exciting with many laughs, tears and joy spread over the two day event, which was shared by all who participated.

The team started to prepare for the event from our home base of Rostock, Germany with our highly trained crew on our two ex-Volvo ocean racing boats the Ospa & Illbruck both vessel types (VO60) and fresh (AA) batteries in our portable transponders.

We departed from the  Port of Rostock one night before the race, on the Friday 28th August, and headed to the start location Schleimunde, Germany.

Next morning, Saturday 29th  August, the race was heading towards Aeroskobing, Denmark.

With a 6:00am rise for our team to stock up on coffee and a full breakfast, we then headed off to the start location, meeting 120 beautiful sailing yachts, a breathtaking view to catch.

Our vessels had been allocated to the Klasse 9 ORC-Club A class of vessels to participate, which meant we would only be allowed to start sailing from 9:40 to give the others a fighting chance :) With a bang from the starting guns we were off!

With so many ships competing for a good position, many boats had very close calls. Some had the very unfortunate luck of getting grounded ( sorry Martin ) and others suffered a break in their main mast half way through the event!
Each boat truly pushed the boundaries of limitations to get the best position time in the event.

It was thrilling to race against so many experienced sailors in an event which was scheduled to run for up to 8hrs from the start to allow the vessels to get from Germany to Denmark!

We are very happy to announce our vessel the OSPA had a fantastic run during the race. After a little hiccup in the start, we managed to secure the 2nd fastest run out of all vessels participating, missing first time placed position by only 40 seconds, despite the 40min later start time allocated to us in the beginning.

Upon arrival, we managed to spot a UAV taking aerial photos and videos of the vessels approaching port, and then sat down for a well deserved beer to rest our weary bodies and cheer on all our colleagues coming into port safely.

Later that night, we all shared a fantastic meal with crews exchanging photos, videos and stories of the day,
followed by a very late night party rolling onto 5am!

With heavy heads but good feelings we headed back home to Germany the next day at 9am.
We would again like to thank our friends from Llyod’s Register and all the new friends we met over the weekend for a fantastic time!

Martin, Kevin and The FleetMon Team