Birthday of an old Lady

Music on the Wannsee, from a photo by Soenke Hucho

Sailing in another country can produce a lot of surprises. I've greatly enjoyed my visits to the Baltic and have also enjoyed showing our friends from Germany and Sweden what conditions are like in the West coast of Scotland.

Sometimes my excursions have been triggered by quite random events, such as the discovery of the materials in the Mitchell Library that led to the story of the Scottie, about which I wrote in an earlier post.

The Freundeskreis klassiche Yachten translates literally as the "Circle of Friends of classic Yachts, which seems to me a nicer name than "German Classic Yacht Society." Certainly their members have shown me great kindness and friendship, none more so than when I was invited to Berlin to celebrate the Scottie's 100th birthday. A film was produced about the celebrations, which they have now posted here:-  Scottie film

For the small minority of readers who don't understand German (or don't have google) I can offer a translation as follows:-

"The Berlin-based Illusion is now over 100 years old and there is now available a ten minute film with the title "100 year Illusion." The film describes the celebrations over the birthday of an old lady and has some wonderful sequences of the Illusion in action. We naturally want to present members of the Freundeskreis with a shortened and web-enabled version. The producer and cameraman for the original is Joachim Luehning, of ATV Hamburg and the internet version has been done by Jan Lohrengel.

Illusion has been a large part of Hans Heckmann's life. He's been enjoying this boat with countless sailors for over sixty years! Naturally this involvement with the yacht and her history makes up a large part of his life story, as told by the biographer Irene Wahle."

In researching this post I also came across a feature on the celebrations in 2005, as follows,

"Havel Klassik 2005

The competition was very gentle: short courses and lots of prizes, and this time the winner of the keelboat class was the old "seven lengths class" Illusion, ex Scottie, who was also a birthday girl, proudly celebrating her hundredth.

At the garden party one could totally relax. The excellent grill and the bar provided the ingredients for that.  So soothing and pleasant was the expert, live swing band  that everyone was able to chat effortlessly with old friends or quietly look at Soenke Hucho's exhibition of photographs.

On the Sunday the course from the Berlin Yacht Club took place under "Kaiser weather," beautiful sunshine. In her home port Illusion was celebrating her 100th birthday, with musicians from Glasgow in kilts. And again the question was asked, especially appropriate in this heat, are you actually wearing anything underneath?"

I don't want to spoil a lovely story, but if you look at the film you won't see a lot of kilts. I'll take mine next time, though, if I get another invitation.