The Round the World Voyage of yachtsman Captain Georgie Georgiev (1976-77) was commemorated by the stamp depicting a map of his route and his yacht COR CAROLI.
COR CAROLI (yacht) in honor of her owner and her skipper, Capt. George Georgiev. Who commenced his round-the-world voyage on Dec. 20, 1976 from Havana. Sailing via the Panama Canal, Marquesa Islands, Fiji, Port Darwin, Port Elisabeth, and Cape Town, he returned to Havana on Dec. 20, 1977, a distance of 24,500 miles.
Capt. Georgiev received the Gold Star of Hero of Bulgaria for his accomplishment. He died in May 1980.
The sailing yacht was built in Poland on the request of the Port Varna Yacht Club. It was made under the license of the American designer Dick Carter and was purchased with the support of Nikolai Yovchev, Director General of Water Transport JSC, and Atanas Yonkov, Director General of the Bulgarian Maritime Fleet, in 1975.
Displacement 3,320 kg. The length of the yacht along the waterline is 7.77 m, its largest length is 9.07 m, the beam is 3.08 m and its draft is 1.52 m. Its auxiliary engine is a 10hp diesel engine. It has three sails – a mainsail, a genoa, and a spinnaker. The hull is made of fiberglass and the mast was manufactured by Procter. Fixed ballast 1,360 kg. The stamps show her only under the genoa.
For navigation, the yacht was fitted out with two Sestrel magnetic compasses, a Seferrer radio direction finder, an electromagnetic log, an echo sounder, a sextant, a stopwatch, a barograph, and a barometer were used. An electronic Hewlett-Packard calculator was used to solve astronomical problems.
The yacht is equipped with a VHF radio, and an SSB radio station, which was later purchased and installed in Suva, Fiji.
On April 24, 1976, COR CAROLI was transported from the Port of Bourgas, Bulgaria to Plymouth, United Kingdom. The city, located on the Cornwall Peninsula, is an important foreign trade port on the English Channel.
From there, the Ostar '76 regatta started on June 5 that year. Captain Georgi Georgiev with the yacht COR CAROLI crossed the Atlantic in 36 days, 1 hour and 50 minutes, and ranking 37th in the overall standings.
On December 20, 1976, Captain Georgiev departs from Havana, the capital of Cuba, through the Panama Canal, the Marquesas Islands, Suva (Fiji), Port Darwin (Australia), the Indian Ocean, Cape Town (a city in the southwest of South Africa) and reaches again Havana, after a voyage of 24,500 miles in 201 days, 21 hours and 36 minutes. This result was recorded in the Guinness Book of Records in 1982 as the best score in this class of yachts.
From 1979, the COR CAROLI has been stored in the Varna Naval Museum.
Source: https://www.banker.bg/pari-i-pazari/rea ... kor-karoli
E.J. Kuyper; WP 27:81,
Bulgaria 1987 23s sg2655, scott2509.