Travemünde Week celebrated a major home victory on its penultimate day. The Folkboat Gold Cup – the one-kilogramme trophy – remains in Germany. The Kiel team, with Ulf Kipcke at the helm and Kathrin and Gero Martens in the bow, secured the unofficial world championship title in this class with a third-place finish in the final race. In the decisive race, skipper Kipcke – who claimed his third victory in this prestigious competition after 2000 and 2015 – kept the Danish competition in his wake and was able to pop the champagne corks after a series of ups and downs.
“We’ve done it after eight hard-fought races. We had a bit of a dip in form at one point, but sailed very well in the second half, securing a day’s victory and a fifth place yesterday. Today we confirmed that form and kept our Danish rivals at bay. This makes me a Gold Cup winner for the third time, and Gero for the second. And his wife Kathrin, who’s been sailing with us for two years, has had a meteoric rise. She’s now a two-time German champion and a Gold Cup winner – so it’s a huge success,” said Kipcke, delighted to now be the most successful German Folkboat skipper in the competition’s long history. The trophy was donated in 1963 by Lübeck Senator Alfred Hagelstein and contested for the first time off Travemünde.
Right from the start, a German-Danish battle for the trophy had developed at the top of the field. Initially, Berlin’s Andreas Blank took a commanding lead, but then the Danes came into their own. Whilst Blank slipped down the rankings to twelfth place overall among the 39 participants over the course of the series, the perennial winners Per Buch and Per Hovmark came on strong and looked set to continue the Danes’ winning streak. The Kipcke crew, on the other hand, initially had to make do with middling results. But Friday belonged to the Kielers. With their second victory of the day in the series, they clawed their way to the top of the rankings.
However, the margins were so tight that the distribution of the podium places hinged on the final race. And there, the Germans managed to keep the Danes under constant control. “That was hard work, because the wind is very changeable in Lübeck Bay when it’s blowing from that direction. A lot can happen on the long courses,” said Kipcke, who owns a successful Folkboat called “Ylva”. The boat, with its GRP hull and teak deck, had already carried him to victory in 2000 and 2015.
Per Buch and Per Hovmark, also three-time Gold Cup winners, completed the podium. A young German crew followed in fourth place. Former skiff sailor Tom Heinrich from Pönitz put in a consistent performance alongside his bowmen, Moritz Diekhöner and David Gorn. For Heinrich, this marks yet another major success on the waters right on his doorstep: in 2013, he had become Hobie Dragoon world champion at Travemünde Week.
Although the Dragons still have one race to go on the final Sunday, the winning crew can already start celebrating. Hamburg’s Benjamin Morgen, with his father Karl as bowman and Nicolas Rädecke, is now unstoppable in his bid to claim the North German Championship title following a consistent run of five wins in the nine races held so far. “It was glorious sailing today in shorts with plenty of sunshine. The wind was almost just like on the Alster. We’ll leave it at that and call it a day after the ninth race,” said Benjamin Morgen, adding: “We’re satisfied. It’s the first event where things have gone really well again.” He had just returned from a long trip ahead of Travemünde Week. He’d sailed a double-handed race to the Lofoten Islands. Next year, the successful team plans to return to Travemünde for the Gold Cup. To make this happen, his father Karl – now 74 years old – will postpone the end of his career as bowman for another year.
The battle for second place in the North German Championship, however, remains undecided ahead of the final race. Separated by just one point, Benjamin Hub (Hamburg) and Tanja Jacobsohn from Lübeck are fighting it out for the runner-up spot.
The Formula 18 class still has three races scheduled for Sunday. However, this is unlikely to change the fact that the father-and-son duo Jesse and Sven Lindstädt are in first place. Even though the pair are not always at the front after the start, they have consistently worked their way up to first or second place. Their only result to discard is a fifth-place finish. This gives them a 20-point cushion going into Sunday over their closest rivals from Denmark (Jan Hedmann Jensen/Penelope Wyon) and Finland (Mikko and Kirsikka Räisänen).
Ralf Abratis
