Vendée Globe: Classical music à la carte: major NDR interview with Boris Herrmann

It is not very often that major public broadcasters devote so much time to sailing: skipper Boris Herrmann was a guest in the studio of the NDR programme Klassik à la carte, where he provided deep insights into his life as a sailing professional, his career, his concerns about the state of the world's oceans and his plans for the future. In conversation with Annemarie Stoltenberg, the 38-year-old talks about his first sails and his round-the-world voyages as well as dinghy sailing with the 505, adventures at sea, the challenges in the fight against global warming and the many demands on a professional sailor today.

Click here to listen to the interview.

Herrmann explains that it was his father in particular who once got him interested in wind and wave sports. Even as a student, his father was an enthusiastic water sportsman and travelled a lot in a kayak. He had explored and discovered northern Germany in a travelling kayak. He then bought his first six-metre boat in the north of Germany because he thought the coast was so beautiful and swapped it for a larger eight-metre boat when his son was born. Father and son then sailed around the East Frisian Islands and out into the North Sea. The trips together became more and more extensive. "During the school holidays, we even made it as far as Stockholm in six weeks," recalls Herrmann.

Sailing gave him "a certain access to nature and also gave him self-confidence", says Herrmann in conversation. However, as a classic Opti child, he was also taught how to handle the tiller and sheet himself. "You deal with nature in a new way, you react, you improvise, you have to right the boat again and you're a bit scared of it. Then the wind is sometimes strong, sometimes weak. It's a different kind of sport to practising something in the gym or chasing after a ball on the grass in a competition. I believe that it can give the children who are lucky enough to learn to sail in a class like this a lot of self-confidence."

Herrmann's next sailing assignment is already imminent: like 20 other boats (!) flying the German flag, the Hamburg resident-by-choice will start the 48th edition of the notorious Fastnet Race on 3 August with Briton Will Harris on his Imoca "Malizia 2 - Yacht Club de Monaco".