He was a circumnavigator, adventurer, journalist and author. Among other things, he made a name for himself as an expert on long voyages, as a documentarian of pirate attacks and as an expedition traveller who researched the early migration routes of the Polynesians in the South Seas: Klaus Hympendahl. Born in Hamburg, he died yesterday in Buenos Aires, Argentina, at the age of 76.
Hympendahl, who lived in Düsseldorf for many years, worked as a copywriter and creative director in advertising for almost two and a half decades and also owned his own advertising agency. He got into sailing through his father, who was a member of the Kiel Yacht Club. From 1986 to 1991, Hympendahl sailed around the world, zigzagging along the trade wind route. During this time, he wrote over 40 articles for sailing magazines.
Sailing adventurer and businessman
After his return, he founded Blue Water GmbH, an equipment company for long-distance sailors, which quickly established itself on the scene. However, Hympendahl's entrepreneurial existence only lasted six years. He then sold the company again so that he could concentrate on writing - and devote himself to new projects.
After publishing a series of articles on the navigational skills of the Arabs, the Vikings and the Polynesians in 1997, he travelled to the Santa Cruz Islands in the Pacific in the same year to carry out a project supported by Unesco: the construction of the last Polynesian sailing ship to have sailed, a "Te Puke". His first novel, "El Niño - When the Sea Burns", was also written on this trip. Since then, he has supported the island of Tikopia, which was destroyed by the cyclone.
In the years that followed, Hympendahl also became a sought-after piracy expert. His book "Yacht piracy - the new danger" was published in 2001. It was the first work on worldwide pirate attacks with 40 authentic reports from crews that had been attacked. At the same time, he ran one of the first Internet sites where blue-water sailors in particular could find out about pirate-controlled areas around the world. Another of his books, "Logbook of Fear", also caused quite a stir. In it, Hympendahl meticulously traced the criminal case that took place in 1981 on board the "Apollonia" during an Atlantic crossing, which two of the original six crew members did not survive.
To Polynesia against the wind
Hympendahl then returned to the navigational skills of early seafarers. In 2008, he embarked on the "Lapita Voyage" together with the self-built catamaran pioneer James Wharram. This five-month, extremely gruelling sailing expedition with two identical twin-hulled vessels, modelled on the early boats of the South Sea islanders, took the sailors over 4000 nautical miles across Polynesia. Hympendahl and Wharram wanted to prove that the South Seas had been colonised from Asia and thus against the prevailing currents and trade winds.
As recently as 1947, the Norwegian adventurer and explorer Thor Heyerdahl assumed on the occasion of his "Kon-Tiki" expedition that the Polynesians had once travelled to the South Seas from South America, i.e. by wind and current. Hympendahl and Wharram, on the other hand, were able to support the now generally recognised scientific thesis with their success ( see also the interview "Heyerdahl was wrong", which appeared in YACHT in 2009 ).
In the recent past, Klaus Hympendahl has worked closely with another blue water pioneer: Jimmy Cornell. When he launched a series of new sailing rallies for long-distance sailors a few years ago, including the Atlantic Odyssey and the Blue Planet Odyssey, Hympendahl supported him as a contact person for German participants and also as a rally organiser in various ports of call. Hympendahl wanted to sail to the Caribbean again for YACHT next autumn, 30 years after his first participation in a transatlantic rally.
It was not to be. Klaus Hympendahl died unexpectedly in Buenos Aires yesterday, Monday, after a serious illness that he thought he had under control broke out again unexpectedly and violently. He had travelled to Argentina to work on a book about the tango - his second great passion after sailing.
