Ritratto: Refit-XXL: con un piano generale per una vacanza in barca a vela

Northern Germany, a Monday in mid-March 2021: it is stormy and raining over the open-air warehouse of the Heuer boatyard in Finkenwerder. And yet it is not so much the weather that is making things a little uncomfortable on board Dana Polec and Günter Nordbruch's Winga 29. Rather, it is the fact that there is little on and below deck of the 8.60 metre yacht that resembles a functional sailing boat.

All the fittings are missing on the outside, and below deck it is almost completely bare, almost gutted. That's how it should be: Günter Nordbruch, 45, from Bremen, and his partner Dana Polec, 34, a native of Romania, have been giving their boat a total refit for two years. This is due to the owner's big dream: Nordbruch has been sailing since childhood, first dinghies on the Weser and later yachts on the Baltic Sea. Tackling a refit project or even building one himself has long appealed to the aerospace engineer. His dream has always been to go sailing and he has long since infected his partner with this dream.

The couple started to put this plan into practice in their own, rather unusual way a good three years ago. At the time, they both held management positions in an aviation company. The working days are long, even at weekends. "We no longer had a private life and said: we have to change something," Polec recalls.

And they change something, radically: they move from the south of Germany to the sea in the north, look for new jobs, plan to leave and, above all, buy a boat. Old and in need of renovation - and therefore just right for their master plan to learn everything they can about boat work before casting off for a long voyage in a few years' time.

You can read about the unusual path the couple has taken since then and how much passion and meticulousness they put into refitting their old boat in the portrait in the new issue of YACHT.