Brain’storm’ing…

Benjamin Schaschek (BS): It started in March 2011. We are both audio engineers. We started audio engineering — it’s how we met in Berlin in 2008. Then I went to Australia to finish my studies there and my return ticket expired after 18 months. I was pissed off on the beach and there was a white sailing boat on the horizon, and I said, ‘Ah man, I’m not spending any money for another plane ticket, I’m getting a boat and sailing back, that might be cheaper…no kerosene, just the wind.”

Captain’s log…

BS: “In the beginning we just wanted to sail for nine months. That was the first plan. We got the boat on the Solomon Islands, close to Australia, because it was cheaper there. Then we discovered we wouldn’t make it in time, now it’s been three years. We started on the Solomon Islands, then went to Papua New Guinea, across the Pacific to Australia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Malayasia, all the way across the Indian Ocean to Sri Lanka, India, down to Madagascar and South Africa, Mozambique, across the Atlantic to Brazil, all the way up to Trinidad and Tobago, Colombia and then here to Jamaica.”

Next up…

BS: “Cuba, Bahamas and the United States. In the States we want to get the boat out of the water and drive it all the way from Miami to Seattle because the boat was built in Seattle 38 years ago, so the boat’s navigation is done at that point.”

Rocking The Boat

Hannes Koch (HK): “The first trip was pretty intense. We didn’t know the boat, we just flew to the Solomon Islands and bought it and didn’t have a look at it before. Within the first three weeks across the Pacific, the batteries died so all the electricity went down, no GPS, no light. We were out at sea in the middle of the night, no lights, nothing. I got my books out and tried to navigate by the stars, I had no idea how to do this, but there was no other way. Gladly, we had solar power on the boat and a couple of hours later, the whole system came back to life. Then, in the Touring Strait, between Australia and Papua New Guinea, we were in the channel where all the tankers passed through and we almost got hit by a tanker. It was pitch-black in the middle of the night, and in the end when we tried to maneouvre around, we almost got hit.”

On recording vocalists from each country visited

HK: “We have our recording studio with us; it’s transportable, so we can take everything in two backpacks and we go. Everything always comes together. We just find them (vocalists). I don’t know how or why but we manage to find very good musicians and record them.”

Musical Flavours

HK: “We recorded a girl in Papua New Guinea playing with her friends in the backyard. They love singing because they go to church. We met this woman in India who was a dancer and professional artiste. The song we like the most is A Travelling Man. We recorded this guy in South Africa …just his guitar, he was playing around with an idea and it was just a guitar piece. Then we went to Brazil and found a piano player who was also a singer and she wrote the lyrics and melody and we actually managed to record a whole youth orchestra on top of that. In the end, we made an amazing song.”

On Jamaica

HK: “It’s beautiful. We heard a lot of bad stories about Jamaica, and that you have to be careful and that it’s dangerous, but I really like it. The guys usually are pretending to be bad guys but then you make a joke and everyone is laughing. Record some good reggae music which we already did. We recorded the Jamaican musician Chokey Taylor. He’s a great singer and came to the Netherlands a couple years ago.”

Inspired by Kon Tiki?

BS: “I remember being in Germany before we started this trip and I was reading a magazine and there was a story about Kon Tiki and I showed it to Hans. It was inspiring. He was on a raft and he didn’t even know how to swim or navigate and didn’t know anything and just went for it. That is pretty much what we did. We didn’t know how to sail when we started the trip. Hans had never been on a boat before, I sailed a little bit on a smaller boat. We were so young and Kon Tiki gave us courage to do it.”

Most Memorable Destination

HK: “I think so far Brazil was the most intense time for us because we got robbed three times. It was a really bad experience. In three years, we never had a problem at all and then suddenly we were, three times in two weeks. We were attacked by random guys, old and young men with knives, in Rio. At the same time, Brazil was so cool. We met so many cool people there; you had the very bad stuff and the very good stuff and altogether very intense. We were there for four-and-a-half months.”

Documenting the journey

“We have a website www.sailingconductors.com. We also plan to release a double-CD after the trip has ended. We have already released a CD. There will be a book and we are filming constantly so there might be a TV series that could be broadcast internationally, but we don’t know yet.”Å