Fairplay VIII is to be preserved

With the 600bhp tug moored safely at its new berth at Sandtorhafen, Hamburg’s new museum port, Joerg Mainzer, managing director of Fairplay Towage, handed one of the original brass keys of the tug’s wheelhouse and the ship’s papers to Reinhard Wolf, Chairman of the Board of Foundation Hamburg Maritim.

Fairplay VIII will be open for visitors and the Foundation also plans to operate the tug for tours with special guests on occasions such as the famous annual ‘Hamburg Harbour Birthday’. The tug recently passed its intermediate survey at its original builders yard and the new owner has changed the company livery back to the traditional colours worn by Fairplay tugs prior to a change made in the 1990s. In future the maintenance and operation of the tug will be the responsibility of a team of enthusiastic volunteers.

The tug was built in 1962 by the Theodor-Buschmann shipyard, a company that has remained part of the Fairplay Group since 1957, and has spent its entire working life under the Fairplay flag. During the handover ceremony, Joerg Mainzer gave a short resume of the vessel’s long history, saying, ‘We are happy that a traditional harbour tug will be saved from the breakers and will in the future serve as a source of information for tourists and groups interested in the work of harbour tugs in those early days, and which in some respects remains very similar today.’

The tug was operated mainly in the Port of Hamburg until 2002, with occasional salvage work. But as the size of ocean going ships using the Port of Hamburg outgrew the 12 tons bollard pull of Fairplay VIII, the tug was redeployed to the Baltic Port of Wismar, where it remained active until May 2009.

The Foundation Hamburg Maritim was established in 2002 by the Hamburg Landesbank (today HSH Nordbank) as an initiative of the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce with the aim of preserving Hamburg’s maritime heritage. Next to historic ships and the Harbour-Museum, the Foundation is operating the Sandtorhafen, a revived port basin in Hamburg’s thriving new city quarters ‘HafenCity’. Among the vessels housed there are the pilot-schooner No. 5 Elbe, the Schaarhörn, the Johanna and the cargo ship Bleichen.