After Rollo Gebhard, a pioneer of female circumnavigators has now also passed away. Elga Koch is dead. After a fire in her house on the Canary Island of La Palma, she succumbed to her severe burns in hospital on 1 April. This was reported to us by Federico Ulrich, base manager of Trans Ocean. He and his wife Rolande were among Elga Koch's best friends. They spent their last evening together on 28 March. Because the airport was closed due to a storm, detectives from Tenerife were only able to fly in on 2 April. The cause of the fire is still unclear.
YACHT author Holger Peterson conducted an interview with the grande dame of cruising sailors in November 2012. He was warmly welcomed by her. They spent four days together in Elga Koch's house above the banana plantation; her gaze was always far across the Atlantic to the west, where she once sailed with her husband. Although she had lived abroad for so long, she had not yet lost her Hamburg dialect. She read with interest the special section of the YACHT issue about the Alster, where she had travelled in dinghies during the war. And who would have thought that she was still watching the Hamburg Journal on TV and taking an interest in the life of her home town?
The interview we published in issue 19/2013, the portrait of their legendary boat "Kairos" in issue 20/2013.
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Elga and Ernst-Jürgen Koch were the pioneers of the German "round-the-world sailing couples". They travelled the Passat route from 1964 to 1967 in their nine-metre steel sloop "Kairos I". Their first book in the Kairos trilogy alone, "Hundeleben in Herrlichkeit", was printed up to its eighth edition. It is one of the most successful German-language sailing books of all time. Generations of sailors learnt for the first time about the feasibility of long journeys in small boats. Thousands followed in its wake.
Long before the emancipation ideas of the 1968 movement, this couple led an equal sailing life at the tiller. Contrary to all the rules of seafaring at the time, "Kairos" had a captain and a "female captain". Motivation through sharing responsibility. This was the key to success.
During their first circumnavigation, they experienced the Caribbean islands under colonial administration in the way that the writer Ernest Hemingway had described them just a few years earlier. Their reports on the trade route so frequently sailed today were new at the time.
They didn't want to prove anything. Nor did they want to circumnavigate Cape Horn - rather, they were travelling to themselves. They didn't make it easy for themselves. Their boats: strongly built, but spartanly equipped. Why did they do without a self-steering system? Who today has any idea what it's like to calculate sextant measurements with logarithms for 20 minutes in metre-high waves, because there weren't even HO charts yet? Bobby Schenk - a friend of the Kochs - had not yet invented his navigation computer for entering sextant measurements. Vague positions, current triangles, Consol radio bearings via portable radio - how did they overcome these challenges?
In 1978, they left their hometown of Hamburg for good on the more comfortable 16-metre ketch "Kairos II" with the aim of finding a retirement home in eternal spring somewhere by the sea. Two remarkable books about Venezuela, the Caribbean islands, the Intercoastal Waterway and a trip to the USA in a VW bus followed. They settled on the Canary Island of La Palma above the marina of Tazacorte in 1985.
Ernst-Jürgen Koch died in November 2003 at the age of 80. Elga Koch was 85 years old - a global contemporary witness and gifted navigator.
Like no others, the Kochs incorporated philosophical observations into travelogues. In their last book, "Paradise in an Hourglass", they bid farewell to the sailing world with two words: "Farewell".
Here is one last extract:
"The wind falls into the sails. The ship picks up speed. It pulls into the uncertainty of the sea with a foaming bow wave. I want to return to the sheltering bay. But if I stay and don't try to realise my dreams, I would have been better off staying in Hamburg."
