Dear readers,

My highlight of the week? A judgement by the Schleswig Higher Regional Court. Not because the result was so surprising, but because it was written in nautical language.

I find it extremely difficult to have to pass judgement on issues whose actual problematic core can only be understood so well that one can answer the legal questions "around it" with a deeper knowledge of the respective subject matter.

Courts therefore almost always employ expert witnesses and experts when it comes to specialised issues in order to reach fair decisions. This is also the case in yacht law. Although numerous law firms have now specialised in handling cases in which owners and insurance companies dispute claims relating to boats, there have been no judges who specialise in such cases until now.

In the case of the judgement from Schleswig, the situation was different. It was one of the many cases in which owners did not pay close attention to their boats during the Baltic Sea storm surge, even though they were still in the water.

Many had their reasons for doing so. In this case, an owner had left his motorboat in Schleswig's Wiking harbour to relax with a "digital detox" while on holiday abroad. As a result, he was unaware of the storm warning or the flood warning. He also missed the storm surge itself and the fact that his boat broke free during it and caused five-figure damage to the neighbouring berth holder. The neighbour then wanted to be reimbursed for the repair costs and took this claim to the regional court, where he was proved right.

The motorboat driver appealed. The regional court had wrongly categorised the way in which he had moored his boat as inadequate. As a guest berth holder, he was also entitled to rely on the harbour master to look after the boats. The complaining neighbour also had such a duty and was therefore to blame for his own damage. And finally, a flood of this kind at the end of the Schlei was not foreseeable.

The court could have made it easy for itself and confirmed the case law of the regional court by citing an expert opinion on the weather conditions and another on the course of the accident. However, the 11th Senate was so technically clear in the grounds of appeal that in some places you almost think you are reading a sailing licence book.

"The defendant does not claim that an unsecured line could not have been expected to slip at a water level of 1.90 metres above the mean water level. This would also not be plausible. According to the local conditions, which the Senate is aware of from its own experience and which are evident from the photos on the marina's website, which were also utilised by the District Court, the dolphins do not protrude more than 1.90 m to at most 2 m out of the water at mean water level. This is usual because it allows skippers to pass the dolphins when entering or leaving a box by looping a line or attaching a bowline from above over the dolphin heads around the dolphins. If the dolphins were much higher, this would no longer be possible for smaller people on boats with a low deck height."

It was not sufficient to tie the mooring lines to a slip over the dolphins in the event of a forecast weather pattern such as this; instead, they had to be secured against slipping up using weaving lines or stoppers. Above all, however, the court made it clear that owners cannot evade their responsibility by arguing that harbour masters or neighbouring berth holders will take care of things on site.

It's good to read something like this. After all, the more relaxed the way you handle your own boat, the greater the risk for those around you. The times may be over when having your own boat precluded any competing obligations in your leisure time. However, I would like to see many an owner return to the realisation that a sailing yacht is also a responsibility. Not only in the case of once-in-a-century events such as the Baltic storm surge.

Lasse Johannsen

Deputy Editor-in-Chief of YACHT

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