On the morning of 21 October 2026, the Water Police were informed of a sunken boat in Rostock’s city harbour. Following their report on 22 October, the fire brigade deployed an oil boom; investigations into the cause are ongoing. It is now clear that the vessel in question is the home-built brigantine ‘Maranatha’. The following profile first appeared in YACHT 5/2020. It describes the creation of a family boat, its voyages and the status of its future use at that time.
The Hanseatic city of Lübeck has many landmarks. Yet despite famous sights such as the Holstentor, the Buddenbrookhaus and the ‘Passat’ – there was a time when, for sailors, thinking of ‘Lübeck’ did not first bring to mind the major sights or marzipan, but rather the ‘Maranatha’, a rustic brigantine made of solid tropical timber, whose silhouette was reminiscent of Hanseatic cogs and pirate ships and which blended in well with the Baroque cityscape against which it was moored.
The design of the ship, built over six years by a father and his three sons without any professional help, is based on no existing model. The ‘Maranatha’ was tailored exclusively to the needs of the family, who intended to live on board whilst sailing round the world for several years. As a result, the ship became a floating marvel. Even its dimensions – a 27-metre-long hull, weighing 120 tonnes and propelled by 600 square metres of sail – go far beyond the norm for DIY boatbuilders. The 40,000 hours of labour and an estimated 1.5 million marks in material costs are figures that are unimaginable for self-built vessels. The fact that the ‘Maranatha’ was nevertheless completed in 1991 and set sail on its planned voyage is solely down to the unflagging enthusiasm of its resilient builders.
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Before she was eventually moved to Rostock, the ‘Maranatha’ had been moored in a side arm of the River Trave on the edge of Lübeck’s old town. The owner, keen to sell her, regularly showed visitors round the boat. “It’s almost like being at home,” says Henrik Arnold, who inherited the ship from his father, the second owner. “135 square metres of living space, seven rooms, oil-fired central heating, a fitted kitchen with a dishwasher, bathrooms, a washing machine.”
He’s quite right. Anyone who enters the “home at sea” (YACHT 24/1992) through the massive bulkheads in the deckhouse, they are greeted by an interior that is more reminiscent of a 1980s terraced house than the cabin of a sailing yacht. The monstrous deckhouse houses the open galley to starboard; opposite is the saloon with seating for ten people on a circular seating area, and in front of this, a helm station on either side. The logbook still lies open on the chart table, with the last entry dating from 2005. Since then, no further long-distance voyages have been undertaken on the ‘Maranatha’.
A classic yacht tailored to the family’s wishes
Even those prospective buyers to whom Arnold has been showing the ship for years tended to envisage it being used as a houseboat, a film set, a floating restaurant or a hotel ship. The fact that the brigantine once crossed the Atlantic in both directions, logging daily distances of more than 170 nautical miles, and later secured top places in tall ship regattas, was ultimately of no interest to anyone. The extravagant living space on and below deck, on the other hand, certainly did – and that is what truly sets the ‘Maranatha’ apart from its peers to this day. But what exactly does ‘its peers’ mean?
“There had never been a yacht of this type anywhere before,” notes Udo Grebe, the designer and builder of the “Maranatha”, in the book *Adventures Between Dream and Reality*. He wanted to create “a sort of vintage yacht with square-rigging”, a “pure product of the imagination”.
In the early 1970s, the engineer settled in the Bay of Lübeck with his wife and three sons. They spent their free time on the water. A converted 30er dinghy cruiser served as their vessel, whilst travelogues provided their bedtime reading. It was a time when sailing round the world with one’s family was becoming socially acceptable. And so Grebe’s dream of such a voyage – and of the right boat for it – began to take shape.
“It was meant to be a proper round-the-world trip, with the whole family, spanning several years, during which we wanted to get to know the country and its people,” recalls Grebe’s son Marius. “But there were no affordable boats on the market – neither new nor second-hand – that met our expectations.” When his father finally sat down at the drawing board to produce his own designs, his eldest son kept him company with great interest.
“I really was a crazy dreamer,” writes Udo Grebe. Whilst the self-employed man’s professional situation was not developing anywhere near as quickly, the boat kept getting bigger and bigger on paper. “Naive as I was, I’d initially drawn a 16-metre-long yacht,” says Grebe, who then soberly realises that by the time they set sail, the boys would probably be of marriageable age. “So I abandoned my previous ideas and designed a 23-metre-long yacht.”
For years, everything at Grebes has served just one purpose
To outsiders, Grebe’s plans seem more naïve at the end than at the beginning. The enormous size of the hull allows for a two-deck layout. Grebe has thus created four spacious cabins with two bathrooms beneath the deckhouse. The stern offers space for a saloon the size of a proper living room. The bow houses the owners’ spacious living area.
From a technical point of view, too, Grebe sets few limits on his ideas. He plans to make the four-tonne keel and the rudder blade hydraulically retractable. Three helm stations are planned, along with domestic systems similar to those on land, powered by electricity generated by a generator. All fuel and water capacities are designed to meet the needs of an extended family wishing to travel self-sufficiently. They hold four tonnes of diesel, seven tonnes of fresh water and 700 litres of black water. The rig is intended to satisfy the desire for a sense of maritime romance whilst remaining easy to operate; Grebe has found solutions for this too. Two mast sections made from laminated Oregon pine and two yards accommodate furling sails.
By the early 1980s, all the calculations had been done and the design was complete. The large family sailing yacht had taken shape on paper. However, there was no money to lay the keel. “It was an absurd situation,” says Grebe senior himself, describing this phase of his life. “We didn’t know what tomorrow would bring, but I was planning to build a sailing ship.”
To get round the problem, he and his sons built a 1:10 scale model. “We were able to operate every single sail by remote control,” says Marius Grebe, adding that the experience gained from the model ship – which was over three metres long – provided important insights into its sailing characteristics. To rectify the faults identified, the stern was modified and the hull was lengthened further.
Brigantine is becoming a place of pilgrimage
In 1984, Udo Grebe set up his own construction firm and purchased a commercial plot of land for this purpose – or so he told the banks. In reality, it was all for a single purpose. No sooner had the workshop been built than Grebe set to work with his three sons. On 20 December, they began building the 50 moulded frames. It marked the start of a gruelling six-year slog, during which the Grebes’ lives were dominated by boatbuilding.
Before long, they will be erecting the upturned frame, which is 27 metres long, seven wide and three and a half high. Using the West System’s clinker-built method, the outer hull is being constructed from five layers of mahogany. “That was exhausting,” says Marius Grebe, because after each layer, the enormous hull has to be painstakingly sanded down by hand. But the lads, too, have long been dreaming of sailing round the world.
One day, tractors pull the finished hull out of the hall, and mobile cranes help to turn the colossus over onto a bed of straw bales before it disappears behind the gate once more. The Grebes are now set to spend several more years on the fitting-out work. “Each of us fitted out our own cabin. Apart from that, we divided the work between us,” says Marius Grebe. His father, Udo, writes in detail about the difficulties in his notes. Not least, money is a recurring issue, even though the construction firm is now thriving – the growing ship is swallowing up vast sums. Grebe invests an inheritance and takes out loans.
In order to build the deckhouse, the brigantine has to be moved outdoors, and from then on it becomes a place of pilgrimage for onlookers and journalists from all over northern Germany. The final stages of the work are accompanied by television appearances and newspaper reports. When the ship is due to be transported to the coast, christened and launched on 22 May 1991, thousands turn up to watch the spectacle.
‘Maranatha’ is Aramaic and means ‘Our Lord is coming!’
Grebes will later explain what happened that day via their ‘line to headquarters’. As road transport is only possible as far as the nearest beach, the 120-tonne vessel will be slid into the water there using airbags. This requires several special permits, which can only be granted on an exceptional basis because dyke construction work is already taking place there anyway. Whilst this sounds more like surmountable bureaucracy than divine providence, the storm that swept away the trees along the far too narrow avenue a few days earlier is harder to explain. Nor do the Grebes alone regard it as a sign that this storm caused the lowest water level in decades, thereby making the launching operation possible in the first place. The ‘Maranatha’ is clearly meant to be launched.
Even once she is finally afloat, public interest shows no sign of waning. Whilst the masts, weighing several tonnes, are being erected and the ship is being fitted out, a crowd of seafarers is always present, and on special occasions the press are there too. For instance, when a sponsored grand piano is lowered into the stern, where it is played in the saloon by pianist Justus Franz.
It seemed as though, after all those years of hard labour, the sun had finally risen on this heavenly project when the ‘Maranatha’ set sail on 25 August 1991, watched by thousands of spectators lining the entire shore of the Travemünde estuary. On board was a crew of 13 family members. The lads are all married, and the crew already includes two babies.
Yet the voyage is not off to a good start. The joy of setting sail is overshadowed by the exhaustion felt by everyone involved, the result of years of boat-building and preparations for the journey. It is only after several days of rest in Danish waters that the ‘Maranatha’ – which is still not quite finished and whose seagoing and sailing characteristics the crew have yet to familiarise themselves with – reaches the Skagerrak and the North Sea to set a course south.
However, the voyage was marked by various unforeseen events. After passing Jammer Bay, the rudder broke. It was repaired in Esbjerg, which cost time, a great deal of money and insurance cover. The Bay of Biscay was not reached until late in the year, and it proved to be correspondingly inhospitable. Ongoing technical problems and disasters such as a fire in the engine room, damage caused by a whirlwind, a near-collision with a cargo ship and dangerous situations where the vessel was left adrift in anchorages repeatedly brought the Grebes to the brink of despair. When a crew member suffers a medical emergency, the ship is forced to call at an African port.
The family holiday was followed by plans for sales and refurbishment
By the time the ‘Maranatha’ finally reaches the Caribbean, the ship’s coffers are empty. The hoped-for income from media coverage and the book fails to materialise. And after the family has explored the Caribbean extensively and parts of the crew have signed off as planned, the momentum has run out. The father sets about doing what had been planned for the end of the voyage anyway – selling the ‘Maranatha’. But there is little interest. A final family trip therefore brings the Grebes and their ship back home to Lübeck Bay.
Here too, despite her fame, the brigantine proved difficult to sell – until Heinz Arnold fell in love with the ‘Maranatha’ in the early 2000s. He, too, had grand plans and wanted to set sail around the world. But it was not to be; Arnold passed away in 2005. And so his son continues to show prospective buyers round the saloon, where Justus Franz once played the piano.
Update 2026: The 2020 profile mentioned at this point that a refit was planned in Rostock. According to the report, the rigging had already been removed; the plan was for the vessel to be used later as a motor vessel in the Mediterranean.
It’s actually a shame about the elaborately constructed masts, the standing rigging lovingly covered by hand, and the striking green sails. Handling them had, by the end, become second nature to the Grebes. According to their experience, four experienced crew members are enough to sail the gaff-rigged yacht. And sometimes astonishing things happen whilst doing so. From wind force 5 onwards, as Udo Grebe reports in his book, this mighty vessel reaches double-digit speeds. And, lo and behold, the ‘Maranatha’ even steered itself.
Planning and construction
It took more than 20 years from the initial idea to completion. A model marked the visible start of the project
Launch and voyage
Thanks to newspaper articles and television appearances, the ‘Maranatha’ is known far beyond the sailing community – it’s a real talking point. Thousands turn out to watch her launch
Technical specifications of the “Maranatha”
- Designer: Udo Grebe
- Builder: The Grebe family
- Construction period: 1984–1991
- Total length: 34.00 m
- Fuselage length: 27.00 m
- Width: 7.00 m
- Draught: 2.00–4.00 m
- Weight: 120 tonnes
- Wing area: 600 m²
- Engine (DAF diesel): 2 x 120 PS
The article first appeared in the 05/2020 issue of YACHT and has been revised for the online version.
Did you ever see the ‘Maranatha’ whilst it was still under sail, and what memories do you have of the ship?
Lasse Johannsen
Deputy Editor in Chief YACHT