Not even the war could stop him. He wanted to sail, desperately. And a French prisoner of war named Albert actually built him his first boat. Thus began Els Sander's sailing career in 1942.
At the end of the war, he retrieved a wreck torn to shreds by machine gun fire from the mud. And now he had a vessel, the "Nordwind", with which he travelled the German North Sea coast until 1989. He knows every sandbank between Holland and Hamburg, and someone like him doesn't need a nautical chart. His most recent chart dates from 1981 and has never been corrected.
Sanders was a sailing maniac all his life. When the labour market could still be described as such, he quit his job every spring so that he could spend the whole season undisturbed on his boat. And when he settled down on Langeoog after working in Hamburg, Stade and Amsterdam, sailing was a fundamental part of his life. "For us islanders, pleasure boats used to be a means of transport for everything possible and impossible." They were even indispensable. Before winter, the islanders used them to ferry food and animals across the mudflats. And Sanders right in the middle.
Someone like that knows everything there is to know about sailing. Someone like that has sailing in their blood.
And he has a distinct flair for the show. Not only is he always up for a laugh, he has also made public appearances on television and in the theatre and written books in Low German. If that was still possible, his popularity was finally boosted by a short television film in which Els Sanders explained why his Christmas tree was the oldest in Germany. At the time, Sanders had already been cherishing the fragments of the coniferous plant for four years. This film document is still available in the NDR media library, click this direct link ! It is worth it.
And you can read all about what this jack-of-all-trades sailor experienced in the new YACHT.
