The stopwatch stopped at the finish line at exactly 16 days, 21 hours, 3 minutes and 15 seconds. On 11 January, the "Haspa Hamburg" of the Hamburgischer Verein Seefahrt started below Table Mountain in Cape Town and yesterday crossed the finish line in Rio de Janeiro as the fastest monohull. Although the South African "Ciao Bella" crossed the line before her, it had started a week earlier and took almost a week longer.
The young crew of eleven men and one woman under skipper Torben Mühlbach, 33, had to contend with a stormy depression and a persistent calm and upcoming opponents 500 nautical miles from the finish. Mühlbach and navigator Marvin Schlesiger, 26, had not only worked out the shortest route of the entire fleet with the 3,571 nautical miles travelled, but also through the low off the Brazilian coast.
The "Haspa Hamburg" was transported from Hamburg to Cape Town on a freighter in November 2019, where the crew prepared it for the long journey over Christmas and New Year's Eve.
It is not yet clear which place in the ranking according to calculated time the performance means, because the majority of the monohulls are still sailing.
This was the fourth time that the Hamburgischer Verein Seefahrt had taken part in this traditional offshore race. The "Hamburg VII", skippered by Günther Reher, was the first HVS yacht to take part in the race in 1971. Other HVS yachts also took part in 1994 and 2000 with the "Störtebeker III" and the first "Norddeutsche Vermögen Hamburg".
