What is the Tocorimé Story? Where was it built? Why and by who?

It started as a dream, a far off and distant idea. "Wouldn't it be nice to sail the oceans on your own ship?" a lot of people have thought this thought. So few really ever went for it? and even fewer realized their dream? The Tocorimé is a story of a dream come true? Read here everything about 4 ambitious young men who shared one dream: sailing the world's waters on their own two-mast topsail schooner; a story of teamwork, persistence and adventure.

Goals - The Tocorimé needs to sail on the seven seas with a healthy combination of commercial activities and social projects. The Tocorimé is definitely setting it's course on the development of social projects, putting emphasis upon educational elements and the intent is to utilize the Tocorimé as a worldwide platform promoting these projects, embracing everyone from streetchildren to multi national executives. Within this vision, the Tocorimé always needs to offer a safe, inovating and high quality product.

The Tall Ship-virus & the cure, Jan 1988 - May 1994 - When life is sailing and sailing becomes life, you end up in 1988 boarding an estonishing French 44 meter two mast wooden topsailschooner, the "Esperance 88" in Sydney and loose your heart forever for Tall ships. Falling in love with the atmosphere on board, the way of sailing her and especially with the type of ship itself. 8 months you sail on her, having the time of your life, crossing the East & Southerly waters of Australia and taking her across the Indian ocean. The virus enters and never leaves again and when we went off the Esperance 88, this adventure ended but the new dream started an outragious new adventure: building our own traditional wooden tweo mast topsail schooner!

Dreaming is a thing. Going after it another one and realizing is again completely different. In this case realizing their dream is beyond any imagination….We wanted a ship of 36-meter, a two-mast topsail schooner of 160 tons of wood. And no money in the pocket. First thing is the help of a naval architect the get the first plans and calculations. Second and hardest part was to take care of the finances. We started a exhibition building company, just because for the amount of hours you can make and everything was focussing on saving as much as you can. Working, working and working, 18 hours a day, on weekends, at night; it doesn't matter! No more presents for your mom's birthday, no more beers in the pubs and we even moved together to save out on the rent and sharing the only set of good clothes we had…..

After a few years it became clear that building the boat could only be done on a very low budget, we realised it wouldn't even be that; it would be a "no-budget" for the first few years! Brazil was chosen as the main place to look for a suitable "warf" and started planning, resulting in a trip from Belem to Manus in a little river boat to check out all possibilities. And, oh Gloria, from all places we have visited, Santarém was our unanimous decition…. A guy called Moses who can't wright his own name and who has never seen a technical drawing in his life before, that couldn't be too bad! Just a little beach in the middle of the jungle. Almost without power and modern technologies. With only a sawtable who is dancing the samba better then the carnival queen and snakes & tarantulas crawling all over…… a perfect place to build the Tocorimé!!