”You’ll never be able to afford the taxi. You’ll be met at the airport,” says Gert Normann when we contact the director of Denmark’s biggest cable and diving firm, JD-Contactor A/S in Holstebro, and ask for an interview.
We are talking about the businessman who has meant most for modern Danish marine archaeology, with experience from several hundred projects on both old and recent wrecks – projects often financed from Holstebro with the results given to museums free of charge. It is also largely thanks to Gert Normann that the Sea Stallion is accompanied again this year by the big diving and cable ship Cable One as support vessel.
And since the director has 60 employees at headquarters and seven ships at sea, this journalist thinks the director will probably have someone he can send across the heath – after all, it’s a half hour drive from Holstebro to Karup.
But Gert Normann lives right up to his laid-back but nonetheless efficient image when he rolls up to the airport building at the wheel of his own car. So it’s into the car and out with the tape recorder:
”If I get involved in a project like the Sea Stallion it’s because it has the right mixture of science, marine archaeology, history and adventure,” says the man who, besides being a patron of marine archaeology, has also made many notable seabed finds in his own right. One of his greatest achievements was the salvage of the huge rudder from the English warship, the St. George, which went down off the west coast of Jutland in the eighteenth century.
”But I am not a collector. I have never been all that interested in objects. It’s the history behind the wrecks catches my interest. Visitors ask in vain to see the many things I have found out there. They are all in museums,” says Gert Normann.
”I have all the diving qualifications it was possible to take when I was young. I started with a sports diving course in 1965. At that time, I helped to comb vast areas of the sea bed and also helped to find the remains of Stone Age settlements in shallow water. In 1970 and 1971, I trained as a professional diver. And in 1972, I started my firm. Pleasure and chance were the driving factors.”
”It’s hard to describe it, but when I am the first to dive down to a wreck we have found, and no one else has been there for perhaps hundreds of years, it’s something quite, quite special for me. The whole dramatic story behind the presence of the wreck fascinates me enormously.”
”A lot of people had a bit of a joke at my expense – they said there is only a teaspoonful of water in Holstebro, so why have a diving firm there? But it’s just as far to drive whether it’s to Sønderborg, Skagen or Copenhagen. I have spread the ships strategically around the country, but most are in Århus. It makes sense, because we have to be able to move around to be sure of enough jobs in our little country and its neighbours.”
”We started to work abroad back in the late eighties. Now we do jobs all over the world. It doesn’t really matter where we have our headquarters.”
Soon afterwards Gert Normann turns in at a row of buildings in an industrial part of Holstebro. Here there are unimaginable quantities of maritime diving, cable and rescue equipment, all packed, cleaned and ready to take out into the world at short notice. There is an unbelievable orderliness and cleanliness about these buildings. It comes as no surprise when you go into the director’s office. Even the computer keyboard is tucked out of the way so it does not clutter up the desk.
After a tour of the buildings, Gert Normann shows off the holy of holies. A huge archive of maritime archaeology, with every book with even the remotest connection to marine history and archaeology set in methodical order. Many of the books came off the press a few hundred years ago and are only to be found in these rooms. It’s a lifetime’s work that Gert Normann has collected here, and researchers too draw on the vast knowledge contained in these archives.
Soon afterwards the active director is back behind the wheel and we head for Karup Airport. They treat their guests properly in west Jutland, and a firm handshake sends me on my way into the plane to Copenhagen – enriched by a really special experience.
Gert Normann has published a series of books on marine archaeology, and there are really a lot of wrecks he has been responsible for excavating.
