Between top meals and fleet manoeuvres

Seven months, 16 ports, more than 43,000 nautical miles, 10,687 kilos of fruit and vegetables, 110,580 bottles of water - the Indo-Pacific Deployment 2021/22 of the frigate BAYERN was a presence and training voyage of superlatives.

When the frigate BAYERN set sail for the Indo-Pacific in August 2021, the Covid pandemic still had the world firmly in its grip. A tour that was anything but routine for the crew and naval command due to the media attention and political interest. How do you prepare for something when the empirical values for a region are around 20 years old and at the same time a global pandemic is rendering port planning and logistics chains obsolete virtually every hour? As so often in the navy in recent years, the motto "We simply make it possible" took centre stage.