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In between keeping (very) busy running his well-known international yacht transport operation Sevenstar CEO Richard Klabbers just won the double-handed Round Britain and Ireland Race
CEO and founder of Sevenstar Yacht Transport, Richard Klabbers, has always been a sailor and has just won the double-handed Round Britain and Ireland Race. ‘Our dedication to the sea, on a personal as well as a professional level’, he says, ‘is what makes us safe, fast and reliable’. The double-handed Round Britain
and Ireland Race is close to 2,000 nautical miles with a start and finish in Plymouth. It has three stopovers: Galway, Lerwick and Blyth. The race takes you north of Shetland Islands, which means crossing the 60th latitude. That's only three degrees south of Iceland. So, not a race for the faint hearted. ‘No, it's certainly not something
you do every year’, says Klabbers. He sailed the race this summer with his friend, Pieter Heerema, in Heerema's Swan 56. When we talk, he has just returned home and had a couple of days to rest. ‘It was an interesting race’,
he says. ‘It’s a big undertaking to race a boat like that, with only two people, over such a long distance. And to actually race, because that's what we did. We didn't just tour around, we raced the boat. Extreme weather hit us twice... It was as a beat all the way, we never got to hoist the spinnaker. It was very abnormal circumstances, and the weather forecasts were way off most
68 SEAHORSE
of the time. ‘Also, this route is mostly coastal
sailing, where navigation, currents and tides tend to be important factors. That makes it, the way I see it, much more interesting than, for example, a transatlantic crossing, where you often ride the same weather system more or less all the way. We had about 35kts of wind a couple of times, but the boats behind us had more than that. We were lucky to escape the worst. But 35kts is already a lot, especially when it's on the nose.’ Klabbers founded Sevenstar Yacht
Transport some 25 years ago, and the company has since skyrocketed to a market-leading position, in a market that has grown exponentially in the same period. ‘There's a relationship, of course, between what you do in your private life, and what you do in your working life’, he says. ‘Already as a young boy, about 10 years old, I knew that I wanted to go to sea. And in the end, that's what I did. I sailed with my parents every weekend around the lake, racing dinghies, quarter tonners and so on... club races, weekend races, whatever was possible. Then I went into commercial shipping. First at sea, as a seaman, and later, after I finished studies, in the office. But even then I was always sailing races whenever I could.’
Above:
Escapade hard on the wind during the double- handed Round Britain and Ireland Race
‘After about 10 years in the
shipping industry - this was around 1999 - I got a little bored and I came up with this idea – let's do something with these empty decks! And suddenly my work and my hobby came together, and I began working with transporting yachts.’ ‘So, after I did some studies,
we bought Sevenstar. At the time it was a small company, run by a local captain and ship owner. And from there on, basically, we discovered the world. Or the world discovered us, I don't know. We did it at the right time, and we grew fast. And over the years, the company became really successful. The timing was perfect. ‘The idea was always to use
vessels that were already carrying various types of cargo – paper products, machinery and so on. But the decks tended to be free. So, as the cream on top, we would add yachts on deck, as an additional business. That's how we started, and that's how it still is today, at least for the majority of our business. But yacht transportation has become so big now, that sometimes we can fill an entire ship with yachts, stored both on and under deck. In addition, we bought another company back in 2013, with submersible vessels. It's a separate business today, working mainly with
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