To person

GOLDSMITH AND ADVENTURER

Passionate goldsmith

"When I was five, my mother told me that the most important thing in life was to be happy.
Later, when I started school, my teachers asked me to write down what I wanted to be when I grew up.
I wrote down: 'happy'.
They told me I didn't understand the question properly, and I told them they didn't understand life properly ."
(John Lennon)

At least two hearts have been beating in my chest since I was a teenager and for a long time I couldn't decide what to do with my life: goldsmith or adventurer? Craft or study? Diamond appraiser or circumnavigator? Family or career? Should I stay in my hometown forever or would it be better to see the whole world?
As I thought about it, John Lennon's quote came back to me and I set out to try and make as many of my dreams come true.

Travel and sailing resume
Traveling is my passion, my job is my passion. Traveling and learning - couldn't you combine the two? One can!

• 2002 with the steel sailing ship Nis Randers, a Scorpion 1000, around the Baltic Sea
• 2003 Shetlands, Faroe Islands, Orkney Islands and Iceland
• 2003-`04 - minus 20°Celsius - ice sailing on the North Sea
• 2004 - 2006 circumnavigation on the Nis Randers with the whole family. Longer stays with the Kuna Indians/Panama and Galapagos.
  Kayaking and gold prospecting expeditions into the jungles of Panama and Papua New Guinea. It is the first circumnavigation of the world ever to have complete daily reports posted online. In 2006, the blog site of wirhautab.de became the most successful private sailing website with millions of readers all over the world.
• French canals - with the sailing ship Nis Randers across the Rhone, Saone, Moselle and Rhine. From the Mediterranean through 178 locks to Oldenburg/Northern Germany.
• 2007 book published by Delius-Klasing. The book "We're leaving! A family under sail" becomes a classic of family sailing and reaches seven editions.
• 2008 Expedition through the jungles of Sri Lanka to the gemstone areas near Ratnapura. I receive sapphires and spinels through barter.
• 2009 - sailing on the Baltic Sea and Stettiner Lagoon - looking for amber around Usedom
• 2009 Travel to the gemstone mines of India - I travel back with moonstone and garnet in my luggage
• 2011 Around England, Caledonian Canal, Loch Ness, Ireland, Irish Sea
• 2013 sailing Greenland expedition with a new ship - adventure in the pack ice. I travel to areas for which no nautical charts yet exist.
• 2013 single-handed crossing of the North Atlantic
• 2014 The book “Blind Date to Greenland” is published by Delius-Klasing-Verlag
• 2015 Canada/Alaska. Bears, eagles and salmon - extreme gold hunting - with my son Mike by canoe over 400 kilometers on the Yukon River to the Klondike River to Dawson City. We actually find gold in the ice-cold waters of Bonanza Creek
• 2015 Mike and I ride our mountain bikes on the “Top of the World Highway” from Dawson City/Canada non-stop to Alaska/USA and back.
• 2016: To the cradle of jazz in the world capital of voodoo in New Orleans on the Mississippi in Louisiana/USA. There I visit Sam Alfano , one of the best hand engravers in the world.
• 2019 Tanzanite mines in Tanzania/East Africa. Through George, a local friend whom I met years ago in Idar-Oderstein, I have the rare opportunity to explore the tanzanite mines near Arusha at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro.
• 2020 to 2022 During the pandemic, the shop was closed to customers for months and I had the time to process orders undisturbed in the workshop and complete postponed projects. At that time my YouTube channel was launched and hit the nerve of the times. The orders resulting from the online presence made me independent of location. After a short time I received orders from all over the world. Complex creations could be finalized through exchanges via modern communication channels - in the end it didn't matter to my customers where I made the jewelry and... well, if I can live and work wherever I want, then it can also be in a Mediterranean location Climate on an island in the Adriatic.
  And so our family began planning to emigrate to Croatia.
• 2023 East Asia/Japan Traveling and learning again: In the southwest of Japan on the island of Shikoku, I am learning the traditional forging and hardening of knife steel to create the so-called Hamon lines
• 2023 departure for Croatia, we emigrate. The picturesque village of Pucisca on the island of Brac off the picturesque coast of Croatia is considered one of the most beautiful smaller places in Europe (Wikipedia). We discovered this place by chance during a sailing trip in 2018 and it hasn't been out of our minds ever since - we fell in love, there's nothing you can do about it.
  Our family is moving the center of life and work to the Mediterranean country. A new, modern goldsmith and engraving workshop is being built here. The focus is on production for international customers as well as courses for wedding ring forging, gemstone cutting (precision cut gemstones), knife making, gem setting and high-end hand engraving
  
• to be continued ... let's see where the journey goes

Publications and publications in specialist magazines and newspapers. DVD productions. Numerous seminars, lectures and picture shows in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Luxembourg. Appearances and interviews on NDR, ARD, ZDF, ARTE, MareTV, RTL, spiegel online and SternTV