Like many other owners, I had already seen the first warnings at the beginning of the week and registered them rather casually. I wanted to lay the mast on Wednesday anyway and hoped to be able to organise a spontaneous crane appointment in view of the circumstances. The answer was a straightforward one: Storm surge or not, nothing works without an appointment! Twenty other owners had already received the same cancellation, I heard. At that point, it seemed to me to be nothing more than an organisational nuisance. The mast was well tied up on the boat and I had secured a safe berth to leeward of floating dock no. 7 in the north harbour. What was going to happen there?
It was only when I told a friend about my crane rejection over a beer on Thursday evening and, in my subsequent indignation, described the approaching storm surge as supposedly exaggerated - high tide plus wave plus 50 knots of wind with a free run-up to a mere 2.5 metre-high rocky embankment - that I realised that this really was a disaster scenario.
Had I really done everything?"
I went to bed, lay awake, brooding. Had I really done everything I could to secure the ship? I got up again at 1 a.m. and drove the 50 kilometres to Schilksee to check.
The water level there was 120 centimetres above normal at the time, although the wind was only blowing at 25 knots. On my "Rémy" I attached additional stern lines with self-tightening loops, which are much safer because they can't slip upwards. Why hadn't I done that in the first place? I then checked the other mooring lines and the tying of the laid mast and was reasonably reassured.
On the way back across the jetty, however, I was startled. Some of the boats didn't seem at all storm-proof. Tattered sails, simple mooring lines, some of them even in places that were at right angles to the wind. I was overcome by a mixture of anger and actionism. I horsed around with a dozen strange mooring lines without being asked if they were long enough to be doubled up, tied strange genoa sheets around unsecured furling jibs and posted an indignant appeal on Facebook that very night to take urgent care of the boats.
On Friday morning there was no longer any doubt
The first thing I did on Friday morning was check the water level in Schilksee. It showed 140 centimetres. The forecasts for the maximum level had been revised upwards, and the Wetterwelt meteorologist Sebastian Wache, one of the few vociferous warnings from the experts, had abandoned his caution and was now talking about a "historic storm surge". But where were the official warnings? The uproar in the community? Damn it, why didn't anyone do anything?
The actionism of the previous night returned. I wondered when the water would start rising over the aft dolphins and called the harbour master's office again. They took the idea seriously. It didn't seem to be far-fetched. The answer was: at two metres above normal, but the danger of the mooring lines slipping off existed much earlier, namely if the angle of pull to the boat was too steep and the ship's movements too violent. The harbour masters welcomed my plan to post a warning to this effect and asked me to add that from now on only two people should go onto the jetties.
The word "mortal danger" was used
I was in Schilksee for about two hours at lunchtime with my youngest daughter Janika. The wind and water level had picked up accordingly, but were still a long way from the forecast peaks. The jetties in the south harbour were no longer accessible and the floating jetties in the north were only accessible with waders, dry or wetsuits. Janika had worked a lot on "Rémy" and christened her. She is attached to our ship. I was able to reassure her. The fenders and mooring lines, which I could check through binoculars from land, were still in order. However, several other yachts were already in serious trouble, especially at the north jetty, where the spray from the breakers swept over the jetty every minute.
The harbour masters, whom I (unjustly) scolded, were now constantly on duty with their dinghy and tried to deploy extra lines, regardless of the risk to their own well-being. Peer Ole Köhnen's private yacht service also did a great job. From the 15-metre "Morningstar", a stately IOR regatta yacht from the 1980s, which was moored close to the northern entrance and already in serious distress, a crew member had to be rescued in a daring manoeuvre. When I returned to the harbour at 5 p.m. - I had dropped Janika off at home in the meantime and taken care of a few business matters - this same "Morningstar" had already fallen victim to the breakers. Only the mast was still sticking out of the water.
I was stunned"
Together with the two dozen drenched volunteers and owners who were stubbornly but just as powerlessly holding out in the lee behind the harbour master's office, I stared at this unbelievable doomsday scenario. With the wind now constantly over 50 knots and the water flying horizontally - spray or rain, it didn't matter - it seemed to be only now that things were really picking up speed.
How much worse could it get?
As the light faded, the harbour masters had to abandon their boat operations. The risk to life and limb was too great, as Volker Karner explained, exhausted and contrite. Instead, they now had to watch as their harbour and the boats in their care were smashed to pieces before their eyes, without them being able to do anything.
Powerlessness is an inadequate word to describe this situation"
By 6pm it was night. I retreated to my car near the slipway, determined to stay until the bitter end - if not on, then at least within sight of my boat. A few other owners had a similar attitude, as could be seen from the row of a dozen or so cars next to me. I had parked so that my headlights covered "Rémy" and the two neighbouring boats about 50 metres to windward.
With the windscreen wipers at their fastest setting, I could see in the binoculars the force with which the ships were bucking up and down. Every tug on the mooring lines was a physical pain. One to one and a half metre waves - in the harbour!
What happened out there was a horror film"
Sails that came loose and went to pieces. Ships that tore loose and smashed into each other, again and again, yachts that got listless and went agonisingly slowly to the depths.
A breakneck rescue operation
At around 7 pm, I phoned my wife Katja and dejectedly described the situation to her. She made me promise not to do anything stupid and to stay in the car - a promise I gladly made, but broke less than half an hour later.
I had seen in my binoculars that my neighbouring boat on the left had been bumping violently against "Rémy" for several minutes. The eight-metre wooden classic belongs to my friend Jochen. It was clear that his left bow fastener had come off. What should I do? Watch from the car as the boats disintegrate? I couldn't manage that. So I put on the wetsuit and regatta waistcoat that I had brought with me for just this eventuality. Then I checked in with my neighbour, who was looking after his Etap 23 in his VW bus next door. Just in case, so that someone knew. He promised to keep an eye out and give me extra help with his high beam.
Then I waded through the chest-high, choppy water to the gangway of jetty 5 and hurried out to my boat, bent over against the storm wind and rain.
Staggering wide-legged over the swaying footbridge like a drunken orangutan"
It's funny how you function in moments like that. You no longer think about the risk. Your perception narrows down to a small patch of footbridge that fits into the swaying cone of light from a lantern. And to what needs to be done.
The first thing was to get Jochen's boat away from mine and secure it with the spare line I had brought with me. That was almost easy. Then it was time to save the mast on my "Rémy". The impact of Jochen's boat against my sideways overhanging spreaders had pushed it half off the trestles onto the superstructure and half onto the side deck. Fortunately not into the water!
It took half an hour of back-breaking labour to get him back onto the trestles on the boat, which was swaying like crazy, and to tie him up again. Although the situation wasn't funny at all, for a moment there was something funny about it. My mast, which was swinging wildly up and down, had caught the water tap on the jetty and torn it off, so that I was suddenly working on the foredeck under a fountain of pressurised water as thick as a finger, which seemed to be aimed right at me. I loudly shouted a good range of swear words at her, which gave me a certain amount of satisfaction.
Renewed escalation
But then the seriousness of the situation suddenly returned. My makeshift mooring line on Jochen's boat broke. Once again, his boat was hanging on to just one of the lines and crashed into mine. The very last spare rope left to re-secure it was Jochen's mainsheet. This meant I had to climb over, cut the sheet from the boom and tie it to the forestay. While I was doing this, the last mooring line broke and we started to sail astern. With the newly fixed sheet in my hand, I jumped back into my cockpit on my stomach. Before his stern lines could break, I hastily climbed over my boat forwards and onto the jetty. Pulling the stubborn long keeler back into the box, hand over hand, sitting on the seat of my trousers with my teeth clenched around a bollard, was a twenty-minute battle that was a long time in the making. But at some point, even that was accomplished.
While I was in a tug-of-war with the breakers on the concrete pier aft, fighting over Jochen's boat as prey, she to leeward and I to windward, the jetty lighting had switched to flickering light. Now it switched off completely for a few seconds. In the dark, it hit me: electricity and water equals electric shock! Let's get out of here and back ashore.
Shortly afterwards, the fire brigade switched off the power and the police closed the jetties. The entire harbour was now dark except for the blue lights of the emergency vehicles and the headlights of a few cars.
The wind had stepped it up a notch and was blowing with a force I've never experienced before"
I later learnt that 71 knots were measured outside the lighthouse at that time. I myself had used up all my energy, both physically and mentally. I swapped my wet wetsuit for dry clothes, crawled into the car and spent the next few hours until midnight more or less paralysed at my observation post. If anything else were to happen now, well, that would be fate. I had done what I could. There was nothing more I could do.
Half an hour before midnight, the wind shifted to the south as forecast and became weaker. The panic-stricken mainsheet lead line on Jochen's boat had held, as had the mooring lines on "Rémy". We had been lucky.
Many others did not. The images of horror that Schilksee revealed at dawn - masts sticking out of the water in a criss-cross pattern, yachts that had sunk and been thrown ashore or onto piles, smashed jetties - have already made the rounds a hundred times over. But I would like to mention one photo in particular that really got to me. It was taken by Rainer Görge and shows the berth of his beautiful Wasa "China Girl". The box is empty, with only a leader line visible, which disappears under water.
Awkward questions
Please forgive me for not mentioning the destruction in Damp, Maasholm or Arnis. This is my subjective account of the events in Kiel-Schilksee. A night of horror that I will never forget for the rest of my life. Please forgive me for asking a second question at this point. Unpleasant questions that are addressed to us all.
Wasn't the drama foreseeable?
Were wind forecasts, water level predictions, the east-facing exposure of the harbours concerned - in short, was all the necessary information not known in advance, unambiguous and accessible to everyone in good time?
Even if you concede that the forecasts were only revised upwards very late in the week, you could have put two and two together. Some people did this and brought their boats to safety on the eastern shore, in the inner fjord or in the canal. They are to be congratulated from the bottom of our hearts for their foresight. The rest of us - sailors, motor boaters, clubs, authorities - must ask ourselves why we hesitated. Why we believed in the deceptive certainty of overly lax forecasts that things would not turn out so badly. It is certainly also a question of whether the responsible institutes see their credibility jeopardised when they publish particularly high, alarming figures, with a safety margin so to speak, which may later be higher than the actual event. The associations need to think about their early warning system, their networking and internal information transfer in an emergency. Gosh, people, there's a WhatsApp group for all sorts of other crap these days!
As sailors and motor boaters, we generally need to take a good look at ourselves because many of us still don't know (or have forgotten) how to tie up a boat properly and secure it for a storm. Because far too often we rely on others - harbour operators, rigging masters, dock neighbours - who then take care of what should be our job. We have to ask why we tie up our ship with a - sorry - cheap crap line (in this case: the worn-out old jib sheet) when new mooring lines made for this purpose with sufficient stretch and diameter are the only life insurance in heavy weather.
Have the harbour operators done everything?
Kieler Sporthafen GmbH has to ask itself why on Wednesday, when the catastrophe was already on its way, it was only doing business as usual instead of organising a concerted crane operation, perhaps also involving employees from other municipal ports, to get as many ships out of the water as possible. Why certain decisions were not made. For example, the decision to clear the hardest-hit southern harbour basin, where all the berths are on fixed jetties and at right angles to the predicted wind direction. Or at least the north jetty.
Should the authorities have reacted?
And last but not least, the municipal and state authorities. They have to explain why there is not this one big red emergency button that should have been pressed to trigger the emergency with the siren clearly audible to everyone. Or, if this mechanism exists, who should have activated it and why he or she did not do so.
This is not about apportioning blame. The storm is to blame.
It's about a sense of responsibility. And in its positive, future-orientated meaning. We will have a lot to work through, to talk about, to rethink, responsibly, so that such a catastrophe cannot happen again in the future.
