"Afterwards I found out how dangerous it could be" - Captain Tobias Kammann
In addition to being very tall, at 2.03 metres, Tobias Kammann also steers one of the largest ships at Hapag-Lloyd: the 400-metrelong “Hanoi Express”. Here, the 43-year-old talks about the tasks he had to master as a chief officer, why he finds public relations important, and what he does on board after dinner.
Collecting ship stamps, reading seafaring novels, holidays on the North Sea – it didn’t take much more to get Tobias Kammann excited about pursuing a maritime career. When he listed “captain” on a career questionnaire he filled out at the Osnabrück Vocational Information Centre, it was clear to the then 14-year-old that he wanted to leave Dissen am Teutoburger Wald, his landlocked hometown in central Germany, to go to sea.
“After performing civil service, I applied for an internship through the German Shipowners’ Association (VDR) and ended up on a small container ship, the ‘Jenna Catherine’, which operated as a feeder in the North and Baltic Seas,” Kammann says. “It was 99 metres long, could transport 366 TEU, and had a sevenman crew. We sailed from Bremerhaven to St. Petersburg, calling at all the ports on the North and Baltic Seas. Berthing, discharging cargo, loading cargo, lashing, casting off and quickly on to the next port – that was hard physical labour! Once, we got stuck in the ice in the roads off St. Petersburg over Christmas. While waiting a week for the icebreaker, we cleared ice off the deck and containers with hammers and shovels.” Even though it was clear that he would not be able to be taken on there later, Kammann stayed with the shipping company and trained as a ship mechanic. “I wanted to learn and do as much as possible,” he explains. “And in a shipping company as small as that, you’re part of the crew in no time because every hand is needed.”
A giant in South America
Although an average student, Kammann’s excellent certificate of completion after his training as a ship mechanic helped him land a job at Hapag-Lloyd and start his studies in Elsfleth, a town between Bremen and Bremerhaven that is home to a school of navigation. “I received my job offer just two days after my interview on the Ballindamm, and I travelled to South America on the ‘Santiago Express’ in the summer of 2005,” he recounts. “The long crossing, the international crew and the many ports were new to me. Completely clueless, I went ashore alone in Jamaica to have a look at Kingston. There I was – a 25-year-old, pale, six-foot-tall man from Lower Saxony – all alone in the middle of the city. It was only afterwards that I found out just how dangerous it could be. The captain gave me a good tongue-lashing.”
With a degree in nautical engineering and a few more voyages under his belt, Kammann started out in 2008 as an officer of the watch. “During the semester break, I had the good fortune to sail for a short time on the ‘Colombo Express’, which was the largest ship in the world at the time,” he continues. “A little later, I boarded a plane for the first time to sign on the ‘Rotterdam Express’ in New York.”
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