A fellow Iceland traveller who lives nearby Kiel asked us to come over and join a boat trip at the Kieler Woche, the worlds largest sailing event. A colleague of mine gave us a lift by car on Saturday and so we arrived to meet up with the guy around noon.

It turned out that the boat was the historic steamboat “Bussard” from 1906 which was hired for an exclusive private trip for employees and friends of the HDW shipyard in Kiel.

  Whilst the wooden interior hides the fact that the ship has modern nautical equipment on board, the steam-engine is still run with coal in the old fashioned way.

Attending a sailing event on a boat is always a wonderful opportunity for having the best view on everything that is going on around you, waving at the cruiseship passengers while passing by

and being outpaced by others.

After all we were lucky with the weather and it was a great day with a special boat trip and even after we got off the boat I still discovered fascinating things to keep track of.