Gorch Fock

Type

Bark

Period

20th Century

Nation

Germany

Overview: Gorch Fock is a German three-masted barque launched in 1933 by Blohm and Voss in Hamburg, built as a sail training ship for the Reichsmarine and named for the writer Johann Kinau, who wrote under the pen name Gorch Fock and died aboard the cruiser Wiesbaden at Jutland in 1916. She was the lead ship of a class of school ship barques built for the German Navy between 1933 and 1958. Specifications: The ship measures 82.1 m in length, 12 m in beam, and 5.2 m in draught, with a full-load displacement of 1,510 long tons. She carries a barque sail plan totaling 1,753 square meters across three masts, is square rigged on the fore and main with a gaff-rigged mizzen, stands 41.3 m tall at the main mast, and is fitted with a 550 hp auxiliary engine. Service History: Built between 1932 and 1933 to replace the training ship Niobe, which had capsized in the Baltic in 1932 with the loss of 69 lives, Gorch Fock trained naval cadets until the outbreak of war, after which she served in secondary roles before being scuttled near Rügen in May 1945 to avoid capture by advancing Soviet forces. She was salvaged in 1947 and taken by the Soviet Union as war reparations, renamed Tovarishch, and used as a Soviet and later Ukrainian training ship into the 1990s. Notable Facts: The ship's design gave her over 300 tons of steel ballast in the keel, producing a righting moment strong enough to bring her upright even after heeling to nearly 90 degrees. After a prolonged, funding-starved layover in British ports in the 1990s, she was acquired by German sponsors, returned to her original home port of Stralsund, and had her original name restored on 29 November 2003, with further extensive repairs completed in 2008; she is now a museum ship rather than an active sailing vessel. She should not be confused with her similarly named 1958 successor, a still-active German Navy training barque built to a related design.