Sailing from Australia to East Frisia: Circumnavigator Heide Wilts

Heide and Erich Wilts have sailed around the world together several times and ventured into the dangerous high latitudes. Heide has described her travels in numerous books. After the death of her husband in December 2022, she continued the series of books about their travels together. Now her new book has been published. About the life of an unusual woman and her latest work.

"I'm a landlubber who sails" - Portrait of an unusual woman

The circumnavigators Heide and Erich Wilts could hardly be separated from each other. Since 1969, they have undertaken spectacular voyages, survived accidents and storms together. To mark her 80th birthday, Yacht looked back with Heide Wilts on more than five decades as a sailor, researcher and author. The portrait was published in 2022. Her husband Erich died in the same year.

She has weathered raging storms to land in inhospitable places that hardly anyone has ever set foot in. Out of a passion for the sea, for nature and its stories. Heide Wilts has travelled twelve times around the globe, often under the most adverse conditions at sea.

In Antarctica, she has to jump into the icy surf to save herself from her leaking "Freydis II" to a shelter on land. She and her husband Erich repair her during the long, icy winter. Their ship burns out in Argentina and they end up losing it in the tsunami off Fukushima. And build a new one. Because Heide Wilts does not give up.

She wanted to hang up her oilskins in her early 20s and become a sports pilot. She had moved to Kiel from Stuttgart to study medicine and learn to sail. In the early 1960s, Heide was petite, young and blonde: cleaning lamps and baking below deck was all she was expected to do. "I was always sick as a dog down there, I could hardly do anything in that swaying confinement." Today she smiles about it, with fine lines around her alert brown eyes.

We are in the living room on the first floor of their 300-year-old house in Heidelberg. A wooden external staircase connects the floors, dark half-timbering separates the low rooms. A mammoth tusk hangs above the green sofa. Heide opens a glass cabinet and displays a fossilised whale's inner ear and the tooth of a giant prehistoric shark, which lie on countless shells and sparkling opals. A red and white dugout canoe serves as a bench at the dining table, with a fruit basket containing pineapples and oranges at its bow. Eternal ice and the South Seas, the whole earth and its history: Heide has seen it all.

"You had to prove yourself as a woman in a completely different way back then"

She was never discouraged in a sailing world in which women were not trusted to do anything and often did not even have access to sailing clubs and ships. In the 1970s - the image of women alternated between the triad of children, kitchen and church and the free love of the flower power movement - she attended the nautical school in Leer undeterred. Until she obtained her sporting ocean-going skipper's licence.

"You can sail without a licence, that's for sure," she says with a shrug. "I did them to be able to hold my own in a man's world. You had to prove yourself as a woman in a completely different way back then." She wants to be part of the crew, have a say and be able to control a ship on her own if necessary. The sailing instructors are delighted with her interest - and her determination.

This is fuelled by the sailing pioneers Ernst Jürgen and Elga Koch, who returned from their circumnavigation in 1967. Norderney, on a summer evening in 1969: Heide has taken up her first job as a doctor on the North Sea island and attends a lecture by the Kochs. "I was moved to tears, I was so impressed by their stories. I knew I wanted to sail and experience what they had experienced." Shortly afterwards, she met Erich, who was already an experienced sailor at the time and enjoyed sailing from the coast to the East Frisian island in his Finn dinghy at weekends. They both shared the dream of sailing all over the world.

Never in one place for long

Heide has always been travelling anyway. As a child, she spent four years in Colombia, where her father was the rector of a technical university. She and her sister learnt Spanish there and also prayed. This was not enough for her mother; she wanted a good education for her daughters and returned to Germany with them long before her father did.

"She was a very emancipated and independent woman," says Heide, describing her mother. Further moves followed in Germany, always after her father's work. Heide changed schools twelve times before finishing school: "I'm not used to being in one place."

For several years, Heide and Erich sailed with sporting ambitions on a dinghy in the East Frisian Wadden Sea or on friends' tall ships in the North and Baltic Seas. Once they borrowed an eight-metre yacht and set off on an autumn trip to the Danish South Sea. On the way, the on-board toilet "explodes" and the paraffin stove soots up the saloon, but Heide still leaves the boat as a convinced tall ship sailor. Completely different adventures await her.

We need our own ship

She convinces Erich to build their own ship together. In the winter of 1975, the keel of their Reinke was laid, the first of three named "Freydis" after the daughter of Erik the Red, the Greenland explorer. Freydis was the first woman to cross the Atlantic from Greenland to Newfoundland.

The name should become the programme. With their first "Freydis", the Wilts sailed to Finland, into the North Atlantic, through the English Channel to the edge of the Bay of Biscay. They then built a second one and circumnavigated the world twice over the coming decades, including the Antarctic; they left the dreaded Cape Horn in their wake thirteen times.

From the tropics to the eternal ice

The winter sun is just shining through a small window onto the glass Trans-Ocean Prize. The cube with the sailing ship engraved in the globe is one of many prizes that bear witness to their sailing achievements. In the southern winter, the two spend a lot of time in tropical waters, especially in the turquoise blue-green South Seas. They enjoy the relaxed, cheerful and easy life, the captivatingly beautiful nature and the friendly people.

This friendliness is still unspoilt in the seventies and eighties. A few cruisers drop anchor in one of these crystal-clear lagoons. In photos from that time, we see Heide exchanging carvings for binoculars and talking to captains, village chiefs and shamans. They feel welcome on the Gambier, Solomon, Kermadec and so many other islands under the sun. The sailor is also a doctor from time to time, providing the inhabitants of remote archipelagos with medication, examining them, pulling teeth and treating wounds.

She is not lulled by the sunlit cosiness, the white sand between her toes, the palm trees under a blue sky. In truth, the South Seas are just the warm part of a bath of change that lasts for years.

The other part, these are the high latitudes in the north and south. When the thick ice cover there lifts a little in short summers, they fight their way through mighty storms and venture into regions never visited by leisure sailors. If you want to follow their itineraries, you have to turn the globe several times and keep zooming in on all the places at its outer ends that most people don't even know exist.

Her passion: unspoilt nature

These tiny dots on the world map are Heide's passion. "Experiencing the unique, unspoilt nature in the remotest corners of the earth is only possible on your own keel. This realisation was like a revelation for me!"

South Georgia is one of these places, on the 54th parallel in the middle of the South Atlantic, a good 750 miles away from the Falkland Islands as the next possible stop. It's a wonderful island, with glaciers in all shades of colour that add depth to the white of the ice, and with countless animals - "beautiful to rest on". Heide's eyes light up.

The sailing researcher

Heide can literally sink into the world of animals, stones and fossils. She can spend hours with her head down in the icy wind in her warm, red overall, searching for these treasures between barren rocks, which tell her a lot about the history of the earth and whose most beautiful specimens are displayed in her showcase.

"I describe myself as a landlubber who sails. Because I'm interested in lots of things outside of sailing," says Heide. Their joint cruise plans are therefore also based on their thirst for exploration. If there's something special to discover somewhere, "then I want to go there, even if we have to take a diversion," she says, tapping her index finger on the table.

Such a "diversion" can sometimes mean weeks of rough sailing. For example, if Heide wants to visit Spitsbergen again, the cradle of the polar bears on the north-east land. Or if he wants to hike in the footsteps of 18th century naturalists on the small, uninhabited island of Kayak in the Gulf of Alaska. If a grizzly attack puts a premature end to their plans, there are new things to discover elsewhere. They often fight their way through storms that do not allow much more than the most necessary movements. Exhaustion and seasickness then travel with them. They experience tension and fear, full of adrenaline, then euphoria after overcoming adversity to complete exhaustion and comatose sleep. "You have to have great passion and a certain capacity for suffering, otherwise you can't do it," Heide remarks calmly.

Adventures between book covers

When it is quieter at sea, she uses the time to write, read and research. When Erich and Heide gave up their jobs in the early 1990s to do more sailing, they also had to make a living from travelling. Heide was already writing at the time, even alongside her job as a hospital doctor. Her bibliography now includes 18 books and several hundred reportages.

She takes her readers around the world and across the Arctic Circle on "the racetrack of low-pressure areas chasing each other with roaring, screaming, shrieking winds, with thundering, roaring storms".

The latest work: From Australia to East Frisia

Her new book "Lights on the Horizon - A Sailing Voyage from Australia to East Frisia" has now been published. In it, Heide Wilts recounts the journey home of the "Freydis" after a challenging Antarctic circumnavigation and a GEO expedition in Melanesia in the early 2000s. The journey took her from Australia to Bali, across the Indian Ocean with Christmas Island, the Mascarene Islands and Madagascar to South Africa, Namibia and across the Atlantic with St Helena and Ascension to the easternmost tip of South America, from there finally to the home port of her sailing yacht "Freydis" in East Frisia.

A journey full of adventures and experiences: Opal fields, aborigines and crocodiles in Australia, a raja's palace in Bali, a heavy storm in the Indian Ocean, an elephant attack in Namibia ... Hardships, illness, death, surprising strokes of luck. And in the end the realisation: it was all worth it!

The book is available for €25 from bookshops, Ihleo Verlag (email@ihleo.de) or directly from Heide Wilts, with board stamp and signature (wilts@freydis.de).