New format for Travemuende Week

Baltic sailing fest to be extended to 17 days

The 120th edition of Travemuende Week (TW) will be celebrated in a special format in 2009. The traditional sailing regatta at the Baltic Sea off Travemuende near Luebeck in Germany will be extended to 17 days this year with high-level racing and a superb festival on shore. Called the world’s most beautiful race week, the event will take place from 17 July through 2 August, with the International German Youth Championships 2009 in eight classes being the sportive highlight in the second part of the event. This addition will take the Travemuende Week to a new record number of entries, which had dropped slightly in the previous years. Now more than a thousand boats with twice as many sailors are expected to come to the estuary of the Trave River. The one-off extension is also sure to bring much more than a million visitors to this popular sailing event.

“It is a great honour and at the same time a challenge that the German Sailing Federation (DSV) has trusted the Luebeck Yacht Club with the organisation of the Youth Championships”, says LYC’s vice chairman Andreas Stuelcken. “And the DSV very much welcomes the fact that the championships will be part of our biggest and most popular event, the Travemuende Week”, adds Claus-Dieter Stolze, who manages the operational side of the race week. The Youth Championships are a plus for the TW and vice versa. During the course of the regatta week, more than thousand young sailors and a hundred plus coaches and supporters as well as some 1,500 to 2,000 parents and friends will experience a social programme that is only possible as part of this big and established TW event.

A week prior to the closing date for entries, more than 150 interested sailors filed their entries in the Laser Radial, but only a maximum of 140 slots are available according to the Notice of Race. So the class representatives will need to look into their ranking list to pick the participants. The Optimist class, the smallest of all, is booming too, with 227 out of 280 possible entries being filed already. The number one class for beginners is the best proof that this will a truly international youth championship with boys and girls from nine foreign nations, including three sailors from Belgium, ten from Denmark, two from Great Britain, one from Ireland, four from Japan as well as two each from Poland, Switzerland and Sweden.

“On shore, the focus point of the event will be the Bruegmanngarten park with a music programme for the taste of the youth on the central festival stage, and once again the CITTI-Park with its manifold fun, play and climbing activities”, explains Andreas Stuelcken. The sailors’ village along the Trave River and the Holsten Beach Area with its choice of beach clubs next to the Northernmole will also be open the full 17 days, as will be the 80,000-square metre event area with its exquisite mix of cabaret, culinary delights and cool drinks to suit everybody’s taste.

The young sailors’ Nationals will be sailed in eight boat classes. The title of International German Youth Champion in the Optimist and Teeny classes is eligible to anyone under the age of 16 in 2009, i. e. born in 1994 or later. With some 250 entries, the Optimists will be by far the biggest fleet. There will be an additional U14 scoring for the youngest, being 13 or junior in 2009, but they will be sailing as part of the main fleet.

All those under 20 next year, ie born 1990 or later, can take part in the classes 29er (double-handed skiff), Pirate and 420 (double-handed dinghies), Europe and Laser Radial (single-handed dinghies), and on the BIC 293 OneDesign windsurfing board. In these classes, there will be an additional U17 scoring for those born in 1993 or later.
“There will be five race courses on the Bay of Luebeck and three race offices on shore for the Championships”, says Claus-Dieter Stolze. In addition to the traditional TW headquarters in the historic regatta station close to the “Tornado lawn”, which will house the Pirate and 140 Laser Radial boats, there will be race offices between the Green Beach and Moevenstein, where most of the athletes will berth their boats. The Optimists will also have their own race office on the Priwall side of the Trave River.

It was an enormously successful start of 56 offshore yachts to the two-week international Baltic Sprint Cup right on the first day of last year’s TW. This year, Travemuende Week will serve as the final destination for the regatta’s fifth edition, which in itself is a cause to celebrate. The participants will race their final leg of 155 nm from Œwinoujœcie, Poland. They are expected to cross the finish line on the Trave estuary on Friday, 31 July, so spectators will be able to see them finish their race from up close. There will be a live commentary on the Northernmole, as there will have been for the skiff races during the first part of the TW on the course Beach.

Most of the championship sailors are likely to use the middle part of the Travemuende Week as a warm-up regatta, and a number of further highlights are also scheduled. There will be the International German Championship of the 505 class with 52 participating crews at the TW start, and the PreWorlds of the Contender class, who have chosen Travemuende for their dress rehearsal before their Worlds in Sonderburg, Denmark. A strong fleet will race in the manroland J/24 German Open. Last but not least the TW programme will feature races in traditionally popular classes such as the Folkeboat and Tornado.

In this former Olympic class, Multiple World and European Champion Roland Gaebler, has announced he will make a comeback. Gaebler’s wife Nahid, with whom he lives in her home country Denmark, will be his crew. “I have to get used to my favourite class again”, says Gaebler, “after all, the International Olympic Committee IOC might decide in August that there will be an eleventh sailing discipline in the 2012 Olympics.” Should this be the case, ISAF has already decided for it to be the Tornado class, in which Gaebler had won the Olympic bronze medal with crew René Schwall from Kiel in the Sydney 2000 Games.