The six-month "class trip" of the "Thor Heyerdahl" ended with eight glasses in the fishing harbour of Wellingdorf on the Kiel Fjord on Saturday. On board were 32 tenth-graders, mainly from southern Germany. The voyage took them from Germany to the Canary Islands and then across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. There, the three-master travelled to several small island states as well as Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama and Cuba. The return journey was via the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Azores. In total, the students and their instructors travelled around 13,000 nautical miles.
Since 1996, the "Thor Heyerdahl" has regularly set course for the Caribbean in the winter months with young people on board, for the past four years as part of the project "Classroom under sail" (KUS) which is organised by the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg. During the voyage, the students are not only taught as in normal school life. They also learn to sail and navigate, go on watch, are assigned to the bakehouse or have to make ships. The programme also includes numerous short and longer stays ashore, during which the participants get to know and understand foreign cultures.
The scientific-pedagogical concept behind it: "The pupils learn that they are responsible for tasks they have taken on, but also increasingly for their own life and learning path. The project offers the young people a living and learning space in which life, learning and work are interrelated and learning is linked to experience as far as possible," says the self-description. The project represents a special educational opportunity for young people due to the exceptional framework conditions.
At the end of the voyage - the last leg of the journey stretched from the Azores through the English Channel to the mouth of the Elbe and on through the Kiel Canal to Kiel - the students were allowed to steer the "Thor Heyerdahl" on their own. In Brunsbüttel, they then handed the ship back to the regular crew under Captain Detlef Soitzek.
The "Thor Heyerdahl" , which was converted into a three-masted topsail schooner between 1979 and 1983, has been sailing as a floating youth education centre for more than 25 years. In the meantime, more than 20,000 teenagers and young adults have completed its educational programmes.
