The village pond in Wenningstedt on Sylt - Big googly eyes.

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As a simple view of this popular holiday resort from a bird's eye view using Google Earth etc. shows very quickly thanks to our modern times:

The whole of Wenningstedt consists of a huge body of water called "Dorfteich".
Well, not quite Wenningstedt. But this "pond" was already an imposing size for its location and as a child you somehow saw everything somehow bigger and bigger than it looks today from an adult's perspective.

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And here they were to be found en masse:
Model builders and hobby captains with their model ships, which they mostly dry feet steer safely from land with your remote controls.

I saw police boats, tugs, fishing trawlers and many other functional models, such as, for example, sea rescue cruisers from the DGzRS, the German Society for the Rescue of Shipwrecked Persons, with increasingly wide-open eyes.

Many of you may still be familiar with Graupner's fire cruiser WESER or the DÜSSELDORF, a completely fire-fighting boat made by robbe. These classics were already in their first edition back then. And like other ships that have temporarily disappeared from the original manufacturer's delivery program, they are still fascinating functional models on any suitable lake or other waters.
There was also a "tuning scene" 25 years ago - just for fun, of course!

I can still well remember a pilot boat with a particularly oversized drive, which to the delight of the audience (mostly children, of whom I was only one) made quite interesting jumps over the water surface. If it ever got into the water properly.
Or a customs cruiser with a flashing light implanted; presumably from an additional flash of an SLR camera that was still analogue at the time in the Stone Age. During the regular twilight rides around the "Wenningstedter Dorfteich" these were fascinating gimmicks.

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In any case, I had been infected with the ship model building virus and drove back to the distant Grossenbrode, more precisely Lütjenbrode (a much smaller place than Grossenbrode) after the summer vacation with the wish that I could no longer get out of my head. Now we had to create our own model!
And so it went in autumn with my parents to the next model shop. In the special offer there was the herring logger WOTAN from robbe, which of course was absolutely unsuitable for a bloody beginner like me at the time and skipped pretty much all available difficulty levels at once. But somehow I got this sophisticated model over the winter and the following spring.

Well, at least to the point that you could almost speak of being ready to drive.

So in summer it went back to the island of Sylt. But this time with additional luggage in the VW Bulli in the form of the proud WOTAN!

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The WOTAN then drove exactly one evening on the village pond, which had already been mentioned several times. I had saved on the technical equipment in the fuselage and thus a slightly lighter model than the manufacturer actually intended. So the model was not deep enough in the water and a gust of wind caused my first model to turn into a submarine:
The herring logger capsized. Then the hull ran upside down full of water, so that the bow sank first and the entire model (the cruise control was mechanical and somehow the propeller was still running at maximum speed!) Drilled into the mud on the ground.

So instead of taking a bath in the North Sea that evening, I was allowed to bathe in the village pond and lift my model again, which I then did wrong.
No matter. I had my WOTAN again and a courageous local beetle driver drove me soaking wet and with my ship on my lap back to the campsite, where we were allowed to pass through the barrier to my parents' tent after 10 p.m.
I am still grateful to the man that I was able to properly equip his white VW Beetle with water, pond plants and mud! Unfortunately I never saw my helper, who was unknown to me at the time.

The herring logger never went to sea again and was scrapped after a few years. And even after a few more vacations on Sylt without a ship, I never came to the village pond in Wenningstedt for the next 20 to 25 years.
In the meantime, some models such as oil rig suppliers or the rescue cruiser BERLIN alias HERMANN HELMS saw the light of day. However, they were all forcibly sold at some point: for the driver's license or the car during my apprenticeship.

After starting a family and various years of normal everyday madness, I came back to the island for the first time in 2008, but also without a model for the time being.
In the meantime, I moved with my wife and children from Heiligenhafen to Fehmarn Island, back and forth a few times, and finally back to Heiligenhafen in 2009. And from there back to the beginnings in Grossenbrode.