A harbor as huge as Hamburg’s is filled not only with the huge container ships and crane installations that make modern shipping possible, but also with the smaller ships and boats that work around them, make their work possible, or serve to remind us of times gone by—and occasionally as reminders of pasts we wish might have been.
When I was preparing a blog on Hamburg’s harbor and the role it plays in the city, I found myself putting aside pictures of the smaller boats that ply the waters, and that’s where today’s blog focuses. A twin of the boat above carried us through the winding canals and channels that make up Hamburg’s water world.
Like the tug and barge just above, many of the smaller boats are involved with moving materials to and from the larger ships; not all the freight in the harbor is in containers, it seems.
But there are quite a lot of tour boats, cruise boats, ferries and shuttles around. Some of them are floating billboards for shows and attractions such as The Lion King, above, or are built and decorated to remind of a very non-German past, such as the imitation Mississippi River paddle steamer seen here.
Not all the nostalgia is for the American west; there are also sailing ships to be seen along the waterfront. The windjammer Mare Frisium is still at work, not carrying cargo for the logging trade, but serving as a meeting and event venue for up to 90 passengers. She can also take up to 36 passengers on overnights. The schooner was 30 metres long when built in 1916, but was later stretched to 50.
The other big sailing ship we saw, Rickmer Rickmers, has a long and colorful history of its own. Built in Bremerhaven in 1896 as a three-masted barque, it spent 16 years sailing to Hong Kong, bringing home cargoes of rice and bamboo. In 1912, she became the Max, and carried cargo to Hamburg from Chile. In World War I, she was seized by Portugal and lent to the UK as Flores, and then returned to Portugal, where she was renamed Sagres and served as a navy school ship until 1962. In 1958, she won the Tall Ships Race. Since 1983, she’s been back at home in Hamburg and is open as a floating museum.
Here’s another historic reminder: a lighthouse ship that now serves as a hotel and bar, anchored near the new Elbphilharmonie concert hall. It spent its working life, from 1952 to 1986 anchored off the coast of England, until it was replaced by an unmanned giant red barrel. It’s been in Hamburg since 1993.
But while we’re on boats that are red: The Hamburg Feuerwehr, or fire department, has an assortment of its own, ranging from small speedboats to sizable barges and pumpers, stationed at several points in the harbor.
In fact, it even has a museum boat of its own, this retired firefighter. And, since we’re on public services, here’s a Hamburg police launch.
Hamburg has so many streams, canals and channels that it claims to have 2,000 bridges (and I wouldn’t doubt the claim), so many of the small boats we spotted were under and around them.
Just like you see parking lots full of schoolbuses, some of the launch operators in the harbor have boat lots. Note that all of these, and more that are out of the picture, are named either Cremon or Nordsee, each with a Roman numeral to tell them apart.
To finish the tour, here are two more: one brand new, and the other another veteran with an odd story. First, the Halunder Jet, second ship to bear the name. It’s a catamaran ferry that operates between Hamburg and the North Sea island of Helgoland. When we saw it in Septmeber, it was undergoing repair for damage by a wave in August.
To my surprise, the U-434 is not a World War II German submarine; it’s actually a Russian submarine, B-515, built in 1976 and decommissioned in 2002. Minus its weapons and secret communication gear, it was moved to Hamburg, where tourist-sized doors were cut in its outer wall, allowing it to become the Submarine Museum Hamburg. It’s one of the largest ever built.
