“You have to have water!” A profile of Captain Henning Refardt

He left Rendsburg when he was 16 and started off as a cabin boy. His new home was called “Karin”. The “Karin”, a three-masted schooner with Kiel as its home port, sailed in the lumber trade between Finland and Denmark, and Refardt’s first contract for employment lasted eight months. That sounded like a lot to someone who was to be away from home for the first time. His job was to haul the sail, scrub the deck, wash the laundry, cook twice a day, and heat the stoves in the captain’s cabin and the crew’s quarters. And all that without smoking the captain out. That seems to have happened once. For a cabin boy, trouble is always within reach. Refardt stuck it out and took a practical view of things. “More days, more dollars!” he says today with a laugh.

When Henning Refardt lists the stages of his career, you start to understand what “learning from scratch” means. Back then, it was still possible to go from cabin boy to captain. “You were a cabin boy for at least 10 months, then a ‘Jungmann’ [editor’s note: a former position in which basic seamanship skills are learned], an ordinary seaman for the third year, and then you could take the examination to become an able seaman,” he explains. He was an ordinary seaman OA (officer’s assistant) on the turbine ship “Dortmund” to Indonesia (already for the Hamburg-America-Line) and on the passenger ship “Italia”, an officer’s assistant on the “Düsseldorf”, and a student at Hamburg’s nautical school. He passed his exams for a boatswain’s ticket (A5II) and then, in October 1961, to become a captain for commercial sea-going shipping (A6).

The young man from Rendsburg then went on to sail around the world: to Indonesia, Mexico, the Caribbean, Japan and the East Indies. As a cargo officer on the “Dresden”, he transported copra (the dried meat or kernel of coconuts) from the Philippines, toys from Hong Kong, and potatoes from Egypt. Then he was a chief mate on the North Atlantic, the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes with their many locks, before spending some years sailing to the west coast of North America and Indonesia. In 1968, he was back on the Great Lakes – though now as a captain. To Chicago without bow thrusters, pilots or tugs. Berthing with just a single propeller. “And the anchor one shackle to water,” he adds with a grin. “That was a nice challenge for us young fellows. Above all, you always had to pay attention to the wind so you didn't ram another ship or quay.” Refardt speaks about this as if it were simple subway ride in downtown Hamburg. He has covered this stretch often – meaning, of course, the Great Lakes. Refardt’s mind is somewhere else now. The swallow is flying over Lake Erie, and Hamburg-Niendorf is now on Lake Michigan.

In 1969, the young man from Rendsburg took over command of a cargo ship of the same name. A memorable moment, including a reception with the mayor, an official visit to city officials in Hamburg, and reports in the press. “A small bit of fame in the old hometown,” Refardt says. “It was actually a big deal.”

In the early ’70s, Refardt was sailing container ships on the North Atlantic for Hapag-Lloyd, which arose from the 1970 merger of HAPAG and North German Lloyd. Even his wife would sometimes join him on voyages. “We didn’t have much time on shore,” Refardt says. “We got engaged when my ship was docked in Hamburg for three weeks due to fire damage. Fortune from misfortune, you could say.” Family matters were organised by telecommunications, the standard means of communicating at the time. Buying a house, for example. “I was in Indonesia when the radio operator came over and said he had a telegram for me on which there was only one address and the question ‘Yes or no?’,” the captain recounts. “Then I telegraphed back: ‘Object still unknown, but proceed optimistically.’” With this text, his wife went to the notary and bought the house. “Telephoning used to cost a fortune, and you had to wait eight hours under certain circumstances,” he continues. So you usually wrote letters. That was a sentence you heard often on board: ‘I still have to write.’ Of course, you wanted to get mail back, in the next port. So they made the calculations for that. For example, it took 14 days for a letter to get to Jakarta.”

His ships got bigger, and Refardt eventually served as a captain on container ships of the “Elbe Express” class in liner service to New York and Montreal. Container shipping was booming and, in 1972, Refardt was asked whether he could coordinate this on land. “Devising sailing schedules, making stowage plans and calculating stability – we still did all of that by hand back then,” he says. “I had fun with it, even though it really wasn’t a calm life. Even today, my wife still complains about that time. It wasn’t unusual for the dispatcher to call in the middle of the night because containers were missing but he had to close the hold. Then you sit on the edge of the bed, take the plan out of your pocket, and think it over.”

In 1974, he headed back out to sea. He sailed to China on the Rickmers Linie, a subsidiary of Hapag-Lloyd. And he had to endure horrific waiting times. “They didn’t have enough trucks, so they would drive off with ox carts and horse carriages,” he says. “We were bringing trucks to China nonstop, but it wasn’t enough. That’s why you had to wait outside for about four weeks. Then, in the port, it would take another three weeks for the ship to be discharged and reloaded.” This brings Refardt to one of his great adventures on land: a bus ride to Beijing and the Great Wall of China. “We’d been warned that the bus wouldn’t be heated except by a small pipe on the dashboard, from which the engine heat would be blown out,” he recounts. “It was January, and there was frost. So we got on the bus early at six with warm blankets. We had to breathe on the windows and scrape a hole clear to look outside. But we visited everything: the Summer Palace, the Wall, the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square. An unforgettable experience!”

In 1976, tanker staff was being sought, and Refardt raised his hand. He learned something new with Shell: to be a tanker captain. “I first got the ‘Bremen Express’ sailing to East Asia to get used to the size,” he recounts. “You see, that was really a ‘big ship’! What an experience! Almost 400 metres long, 65 metres wide and 21 metres deep when loaded.” And Refardt had to relearn a very special manoeuvre. “Coming from the Persian Gulf, you had too much draught for the English Channel,” he explains. “So you would pump about 80,000 to 90,000 tonnes of crude oil into another tanker. The large tanker and the small tanker would meet in Limebay, near Plymouth in southern England. This would bring the ship to a draught of 19 metres, and then it would work.”

He has his most violent weather experience at sea on the “Hong Kong Express”. “It was a storm with hurricane gusts near Sicily, the ship was heeling up to 30 degrees,” Refardt says. “You sail relatively slowly and see the next wave trough coming and you know you’re going right in there. The ship would be lying on its side, going back and forth about four to five times. This was the moment when you wanted to be somewhere else, but there wasn’t a whole lot you could do about it. There was a lot of damage inside the ship: porcelain, spare parts for machines, glass doors etched with ornamentations. But, luckily, no people or cargo were hurt.”

Refardt seems to have always been at sea. It’s amazing how much can happen in a single career. He worked in Ship Operations in San Francisco for the new Hapag-Lloyd Transpacific Line. And, in 1983, he took his next trip around the world. “A group of three captains was formed to study the port charges,” he recounts. “For seven weeks, I travelled from port to port – to Jakarta, to Hong Kong, to Singapore, to Tokyo – to demonstrate to port and terminal executives that their port, tug, pilot and transshipment costs were too high.”

Then he returned to container shipping – to the Far East, the Caribbean, Mexico and New York. “I sailed on the wonderful ‘workhorses’ of the ‘Stuttgart’ class,” he says. “They weren’t all that big, carrying 2,500 TEU and about 240 metres long. But they were very stable and pleasant in terms of the quality of the living conditions. They were built in Lübeck by the Flender-Werke company. Fantastic ships.” If someone at the TV show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” needs a lifeline for ships, Hennig Refardt is to be recommended.

Last but not least, Refardt, as representative of the senior management, submitted his candidacy for the Supervisory Board of Hapag-Lloyd AG and was elected. He served on the board from 1997 to 2000. Then, at the age of 64, it was naturally still too early for him to end his seafaring days. He had a hard time giving it up. Once a year, he sails on the Baltic Sea with the “Deutscher Jugendwerk zur See”, an organisation that tries to get young people interested in seafaring. On a schooner, almost like at the beginning of his career. “All this will end now because the old people can’t get their legs over the rail anymore,” he says with a smile before dryly adding: “You can’t quit seafaring. You have to have water!”