Janet Jensen/The News Tribune

U.S. Coast Guard Barque Eagle motored to an advantageous spot near the starting line of the first leg of the Tall Ships Challenge.

Lynx, Amazing Grace, Lady Washington, and Adventuress were nearby, all with sails raised, all with captains working out their strategy.

On Eagle’s deck, crew and cadets stood ready to fill the sky with canvas.
The crew does not raise the main sails on a square-rigged ship. They lower most of them from the yardarms. Then, when they douse the sails, they climb the rigging up to the yards, and pull the sails on top of the yard by hand. That’s called furling the sails, and they do it on yardarms 30 to 140 feet above the deck.

“The strategy was to get a good start and to make the best speed we could as close to the wind as possible,” Capt. J. Christopher Sinnett said. “Another part of the strategy was to avoid a close quarters situation with any of the other tall ships.”

Eagle is a three-masted barque, and, at 295 feet, at least 100 feet longer than the other boats in the race.

“The cadets and crew had spent half an hour preparing for the race, so that when the command ‘Set all squares’ rang out, Eagle went from no canvas to 18,000 square feet in about 60 seconds,” Sinnett said. “The remaining 5,000 square feet were set a few moments later, as we approached the starting line.”

Janet Jensen/The News Tribune

The plan was to head for Port Angeles.
But the wind was southwesterly.

“We were unable to get closer than 55 degrees off the course we needed to make,” Sinnett said.
That means that two thirds of the way across the straits, Eagle needed to tack.

“When we did tack, we quickly learned why square riggers were replaced by schooners,” Sinnett said “ Square riggers can only sail 75 degrees to the true wind. So when we tacked, instead of heading to Port Angeles, we were heading back to Victoria.”

That’s about the time Eagle passed Lady Washington going in the opposite direction.

“Because it was going to take so much time to work our way to windward and get to Port Angeles, we made the decision to enjoy sailing on the breeze we had, and to not worry about the race,” Sinnett said. “When we got close to Vancouver Island, we doused sail and set ourselves up for an evening’s worth of training while staying clear of the commercial traffic lanes.”

Tuesday morning, Eagle will transit to Seattle, where she will anchor near the Coast Guard station Tuesday afternoon.

Janet Jensen and I are set up aboard Eagle.
I was tempted to say we are settled in, but this ship is so complex, that would be an overstatement.

Over the next few days, we aim to give you a taste of life aboard America’s Tall Ship.

That taste in the wardroom, the officers’ dining room, is pasta salad and sautéed broccoli. Lunch is early today, so everyone can be on deck for the sprint to Port Angeles, the first race of the Tall Ships Challenge.

The first thing you learn onboard is that you knock on every closed door you intend to open. The doors are watertight, and you open them with a lever that could crush the fingers of a person opening them on the other side. Already this year, one person has a case of flat fingers.

I’ll be rooming with Food Service Chief Leta Gibbons.

Remember the stories from Astoria, where the cadets aboard ate everything except the amaretto non-dairy creamer? They hate amaretto non-dairy creamer. They wondered who bought it, and why.

FSC Gibbons buys it. Why?

“Because they hate it,” she said.

She might be joking. She might not.

She has fitted out her bunk, the lower one, with a satin quilt and decorative pillows. I have the top rack, and have pledged to make it every day. I also have promised myself not to sit up suddenly in the night and slam into the metal beams. We each have a locker, and there’s a sink and a fold-out desk.

Each morning we will muster to the waist of the ship, the broad deck at the middle. Throughout the day, we will check in three times, so the officers will know we have not gone overboard. For safety drills, we will report to Lifeboat 3, starboard. We should not confuse lifeboats with the motor launches winched up to each side of the ship.

“The lifeboats are in the big white cans,” EMC Michael Barnhouse said.

We will be welcome on deck at any time, and we will be encouraged to pitch in and help with most any task.

“Anybody want to get on a line, get on a line,” Barnhouse said.

On Eagle, we’ll learn by doing.

USCG Barque Eagle was tearing from Victoria toward Port Angeles at 11 knots. That’s about 14 miles per hour in land terms, which just doesn’t capture the sense of speed on the sea.

The 60-by-30-foot American flag was beating in the wind, and being beaten up by the winds. It was time to replace the large national ensign with a smaller version.

The question: How to transfer it from the flag halyard attached to the mizzen boom, onto the deck and into safe storage in a good wind with respect and reverence?

And in the middle of the first race of the Tall Ships Challenge?

Eagle does not have 60 feet of unobstructed deck space.
It does, however, have the crucial resource
Bos’n Keith Raisch identified.

“Throw a lot of people at it,” he said.

The flag came down like a sail. Unlike a sail, it did not touch the deck. Instead, 18- and 19-year-old cadets gathered it up and toted it to the waist of the ship. Then they tried to sort it out.

Some held on to the edges. Some stood under it to keep it off the deck. Some worked on a plan.

They adjusted the jumble of fabric until they had the blue field of stars at one end and the stripes bundled at the other.
They negotiated the folds, backing under the deck to make room, until they could begin folding the stripes, triangle by triangle, until it was a perfect form of white stars on blue.

All told, it took them about half an hour to fold the ensign, and ace what might as well have been an exercise in a leadership course.

We’re about to see Eagle fly.

Photographer Janet Jensen and I will board U.S. Coast Guard Barque Eagle at 7:30 this morning for our transit home to Tacoma. We’ll be blogging to you from a day and a night at sea, two nights anchored in Elliott Bay off Seattle, and from the Parade of Sail into Commencement Bay. Eagle will be the final ship in the parade, which will be escorted by a Tacoma fire boat, and led by Lady Washington.

Today, the Tall Ships will race out on the first day of the Tall Ships Challenge, the race at the heart of all these festivals.
Vessels sail in classes based on size and class, and they set out with handicaps. We’ll tell you more about how that works as we learn it from Eagle’s crew today.

All the ships will raise their sails and set off from Ogden Point at noon, though they’ll be leaving Victoria Harbour between 10 and 10:30 a.m. It will be the first chance for people here to see all the ships under sail, thanks to the high and gusty winds that forced some ships, including Eagle, to motor into the festival.

The festival closed Sunday evening with a ceremony, a concert, and dozens of tired but happy vendors breaking down their booths and loading up their wares. The fleet was leaving. The fun was heading south.

Comment on this post to ask us what you’d like to know about Eagle and the officers, crew and cadets aboard her. Janet and I will get your answers, and show you the details and the big, majestic pictures to introduce you to America’s Tall Ship.

We braved the crowds, made it onto Bounty today and picked up cool info you can use to impress your kids, and innocent bystanders, when line up to see her in Tacoma.

Given her origins, Bounty is the last ship you’d think would be the site of a legendary mutiny. She started out hauling coal around Britain, for crying out loud.

Shipwrights at Deptford Naval Yards built her as a collier in 1784. Her owners christened her “Bethia” and fitted her out with an uncharacteristically modest figurehead. This woman of wood is so corseted and overdressed, it would take a forklift to give her a wardrobe malfunction.

The figurehead, which William Bligh described as “a handsome woman in a riding habit. Well carved,” stayed put when new economic interests steered Bethia out of the coal business and renamed her Bounty.

The sugar cane and indigo businesses were booming in the Indies, and the plantation owners were looking for ways to reduce the food costs on their employees. Breadfruit seemed like a natural. It’s fast-growing and nourishing. A person might even develop a taste for it.

In 1787, Bounty was converted into a pea patch.

The owners hired Bligh and a botanist to sail her to Tahiti, dig up a lot of breadfruit plants and make haste to get them back into the ground in the West Indies.

Things did not go smoothly. Fletcher Christian and the crew voted Bligh off the show at Pitcairn Island. They sank Bounty.

The rest is history made for the movies, notably one starring Marlon Brando, Trevor Howard and this ship in 1962. MGM studios had it built in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, 30 percent bigger than the original. They needed room for the cameras and cast to move around. Also, the movie folk were bigger than Bounty’s first crew. Especially Marlon Brando, who pretty much ate everything on the location shoot. The guy split 50-plus pairs of expensive costume pants.

Feel better about that shave ice now?

Bounty looks big and bulky, but she’s fun to sail, said crew member Carolyn Moss, 23, of Detroit.

When you take the helm on this ship, you’re touching history. The MGM prop masters bought a ship’s wheel from the 1830s at auction. It still works just fine.

Should you be called upon to swab the deck or polish the rail, you would be getting your daily dose of hand-me-down glamour. Kiera Knightley did those very jobs aboard Bounty when they both starred in the second and third versions of Pirates of the Carribbean.

Though Spongebob Squarepants has also co-starred with Bounty in a movie, he was safely off the boat when Kiera got down to scrubbing.

Rene Linares has a bit of advice for downtown Tacoma merchants looking to profit from Tall Ships: Extend your hours.

Linares, an assistant manager at Lush, a trendy bath and body products store on Government Street, has been enjoying the Tall Ships glow the vessels have cast over downtown Victoria.

“Everyone is happy,” he said.

It could be the ships, or the significant amount of grog and grub selling at restaurants near the harbor. The places are packed.

Everyone may be happy, but not enough to turn over wads of cash for chunks of rustic soap.

It could be timing. It’s hot here. It’s in the 80s, maybe the 90s. People don’t want to be carrying much more than a water bottle. And the big crowds stay down around the harbor as long as there’s a boat to board.

“It’s a little slow during the day,” Linares said. “There are more people in the streets when Tall Ships closes down.”

Unfortunately, Lush and the ships close around the same time.

It’s been slow, too, at Souvenir Liquidation, a long-time vendor of fleeces, sweats, T-shirts and shot glasses. Could be the weather, which is not whispering “better get a nice warm top.”

Or it could be the economy, from the price of gas to the fact that a dollar bill and a loonie are worth about the same.

“I haven’t seen as many people in the square this summer,” said Mary Swift, director of the Maritime Museum of British Columbia on Bastion Square.

From what she’s heard, the weak dollar, the high cost of fuel and more complicated border crossings have slowed Victoria’s tourism economy. But Tall Ships is boom time for the museum, which helped organize the original festival and is woven into this one. The museum is running the pirate school and has heritage displays in the festival’s Cultural Mosaic area. Crews have free admission to the museum, and the captains gathered there for a formal dinner Saturday night.

Walk-through traffic has been way up throughout the ship fest, she said.

Walk-by traffic has been up outside Munro’s, Victoria’s legendary book store, said bookseller Jessica Paul.

“You don’t see it reflected in the store,” she said, despite the maritime books on display in the window. “I’ve had regular customers complain about the difficulty of getting to the store because of all the closed streets.”

If the people strolling past are from the U.S, they might be put off by the fact that publishers price books higher in Canada than in the U.S. It’s a practice that made sense when the dollar was stronger. Now, Canadians see it as punitive.

If they wanted their book budgets plundered, they’d call a pirate. They happen to have a few dozen handy.

Saturday afternoon I peered down the hatch and into Lynx’s stateroom with its paneled bulkheads and plush curtained berths.

There, sitting on the floor amid squares of tin foil and piles of black powder, were Saul Lipton, 25, of Chicago, and Melissa Witmer, 30, from Lancaster, Pa.

They were making the ammo for that evening’s battle sail with Lady Washington, Amazing Grace and Hawaiian Chieftain. And they were just a notch too happy.

“We just figured out a way to pack them tighter in the gun, which makes them louder,” Saul said.

Louder is better, much, much better, on a battle sail. In the absence of deadly bits of metal, it’s volume, quantity, spirit and snappy maneuvering that determine the winner. So the two were manufacturing faux ammo as fast as possible.

“Here I am,” Witmer said, “a Mennonite from Lancaster, rolling shot on a Tall Ship.”

But did their big bang theory work?

That evening, we found the longest line in Victoria. We strolled down to the houseboats for dinner at Barb’s Fish and Chips take-out and waited an hour to place our order and another 30 minutes to pick it up. (Yes, it was worth it.)

That gave us plenty of time to listen to the exchange of black powder courtesies going on during the battle sail. It went like this: “Pow. Wham. Bam. WHOMPA.”

Score for Lipton and Witmer’s sound track.

As the ships sailed back into harbor, we stood at the end of the docks, waving and cheering for them.

“Fire on us!” we called to Lynx’s crew.

“Can’t!” they hailed us back. “We’re out of shot!”

Then they taught us a neat trick.

“Bang!” they yelled at us in unison.

“Bang!” we all yelled back.

Remember that, if you should find yourself on Ruston Way without a cannon during Thursday’s Parade of Sail.

You can bet Lipton and Witmer will have plenty of tightly packed shot at hand, and they’ll take aim at any provocateurs ashore.

Embedded in Victoria’s Tall Ships throngs, we’ve gotten a crash course in navigating the paths and docks and fair ways of the festival.

You might think you know how to walk with 10,000 or so other people around you, but historic sailing vessels change the rules.

So here’s a new set:

1. Be vigilant for photo hazards. Apparently, everyone wants a clear shot of a loved one standing in front of a ship. To get it, the subject stands by the ship and the shooter backs up until the framing is just right. Your challenge is twofold: Avoid being backed into, and stop dead before you end up stored in someone’s digital camera.

2. React quickly to sudden random stops. The person in front of you may halt without warning to avoid a photo hazard. The overheated parent may suddenly realize that one of the over-stimulated kids has run off to be a pirate. The cluster of teens may sense an immediate need for shave ice. Your job: Swerve, halt, or end up with your $6 ice cream cone on your shirt.

3. Maintain your infrastructure. Wear comfy shoes and clothes. Pack twice as much water as you think you’ll need, because once you’re inside the grounds, water doubles in price. Slather up with sunscreen. Pack moist wipes to deal with ice cream hazards.

4. Be alert to the rigging. Nothing stops a Tall Ships crowd faster than the sight of a nimble crew member waltzing out on a yardarm to adjust a halyard, or whatever it is they do 40 feet in the air without a net. Stop, too, and forgive the person who bumps into you.

Straight off the Victoria Clipper, we set off to see the Tall Ships, beginning with Adventuress, moored in front of the Empress Hotel.

It was surprisingly easy – no lines and no waiting for those mid-sized ships.

That’s a huge improvement over the 2005 festival, when people complained about long waits in hot weather.

The weather’s about the same, in the 80s, and feeling like the 90s, but even for the big boats, the lines are short and survivable. At noon, it took about 20 minutes to see Lynx, Lady Washington and Canada’s sleek racer HMCS Oriole.

It’s not that there are fewer people here. Festival spokesman Bill Eisenhauer says sales of $5 tickets to the festival grounds are at or above 2005 levels. Organizers have just developed a smarter, simpler system for getting as many people as possible onto as many boats as possible.
Late in the afternoon, it took us only 15 minutes to get onto U.S. Coast Guard Barque Eagle’s self-guided tour.

People here are still yearning to see Eagle under sail.

On Thursday, the winds picked up before the Parade of Sail from Fort Rodd Hill into Victoria Harbour. The gusts, said, Eisenhauer, were so strong, organizers had to tell some ticket holders they could not board their ships for the parade past the crowded shoreline. The wind was so strong it could have powered Eagle to speeds unsafe in the harbor crowded with Tall ships, sea planes, tourist craft and kayaks. Fans are now hoping Eagle will be able to depart under sail on Monday, so they can see her at her best.

=> Read more!

Tall Ships volunteer Jerry Collen called last night with a request to get the word out on a project he's working on.

You see, Jerry's job is to pick up any mail for the ships at the downtown post office and deliver it to the sailors. He's trying to drum up a little advance business by encouraging local residents to write welcome letters to visiting sailors. Tell them about yourself. Give them visitor tips for Tacoma. Ask them to write back.

Sounds like just the job for my 8-year-old who's already complaining about being bored two weeks into summer vacation.

Address letters to:

Tall Ships Tacoma
(Name of Ship)
General Delivery
Tacoma, WA 98402

Let's fill up Jerry's mailbag.

Welcome aboard the Victoria Clipper.
We’re passing Kingston, heading for Victoria Harbour and the first festival of the 2008 Tall Ships Challenge.

It should be a doozy.

British Columbia marks its 150th anniversary as a crown colony this year, and Tall Ships is the premier event of the celebration, said Geoff Corbett, Executive Director of Victoria Tall Ships Society.

They’re having some fun with that centennial-and-a-half at the festival, with many of their performances tied to Victoria’s history.

And they’ll have historically correct food.

A group called History Bites has lined up vendors to sell dishes that represent each of BC’s official decades, everything from venison to crumpets. We’ll sample a few of the historical flavors and get back to you.

We’ve run into several folks on the Clipper who are heading up for Tall Ships. That should warm the cockles of B.C. government types.

“The provincial government has been very supportive of the event,” Corbett said.

No wonder.

Economists from the University of British Columbia studied the impact Tall Ships 2005 had on the province.

“We had a $4.3 to $5 million boost to the economy as a direct result of funds brought in from outside,” Corbett said.

It looks promising for a repeat. The hotels are getting full. Tickets to board the ships have been selling briskly.

“We’ve seen ticket sales to people from five or six European Countries,” Corbett said. ”And Alberta has been a huge market. Last time it accounted for 10 or 11 percent of the tickets. Now it may be higher.”

Consider that a reminder to call all your friends and relations in Idaho and Michigan and tell them they still have time to get their debit cards out to Commencement Bay by July 3.

If you’ve ever been to Victoria or Vancouver, you’ve likely seen the putt-putt foot ferries carrying tourists and locals from one cool spot to another. The little fleets are the cute way to get to places like Barbie’s Fish & Chips, The Empress Hotel, Granville Island, False Creek.

Tacoma’s been working on the cool places, along the Thea Foss Waterway. We’ve got every kind of museum you could wish for, a Sea Scout base, parks and restaurants. Places to go, things to do, sights to see.

Now we have cute boats, too, for the Tall Ships festival, at least.

Michael Jameson of Admiralty Yacht Sales has added Duffy Boats to its line, and will be giving free rides in them during Tall Ships.

The electric boats charge up for about a dollar a day, Jameson said, and are as easy as a golf cart to drive. Though one would probably not wish to drive a golf cart alongside Amazing Grace or Adventuress.

I talked with Tall Ships Tacoma spokesman Matthew Erlich about the festival’s planned attendance of 700,000. Exactly how, I asked, did they arrive at that number?

The answer: They looked at 2005’s attendance.

Organizers planned for 400,000 people during the inaugural festival, Erlich said, but no one kept an official attendance. Based on police estimates at the Parade of Sail, the length of lines and the number of personal watercraft in the area, organizers estimated between 700,000-800,000 people attended the event.

“We hope the number of 700,000 visits will be met,” Erlich said, “and I’m pretty confident there will be that number of visitors coming to the festival.”

Photographer Janet Jensen and I will head to Victoria Saturday morning to tell you what our B.C. friends’ festival is like.

You can think of me as your Port of the Year semi-secret agent.

I want to see what those Victorians are up to in terms of pampering crews, so we can outdo them.

Crews in the 2005 Tall Ships Challenge liked us best. When the American Sail Training Association asked them to vote for the friendliest, most fun port they’d visited, they chose Tacoma.

I’d like to see us win again. You can’t be too nice to the people who are sailing these glorious ships into Commencement Bay. And Port of the Year is a honor that can translate into tourism mojo.

We’ve had a chance to chat with some of the cadets and crew aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Barque Eagle, and they asked me to ask you what they should do and see, and where they should eat while they’re here.

There are about 150 cadets and 50-some crew and officers, so we are talking 200 guests to our waterfront from that ship alone.

Got a favorite spot? A pizza bargain? A good place to get a pedicure? Push the comment button on this post, and tell us your recommendations. The cadets are not yet 21, and they may not be big spenders, so keep that in mind. The crew members are mostly 21 and older and eager to explore the best of Tacoma.

We’ll be sailing down aboard Eagle, so we’ll have plenty of opportunity to share your suggestions with America's Tall Ship's sailors.

We’ll invite Eagle’s sailors to log on with their specific queries, too, so check back. You might have just the info they want.

Word is in from America’s Privateer Lynx that there are still spots available on the Baltimore clipper’s transit south from Victoria.

For $150, you can sail from Port Townsend to Quartermaster Harbor, a trip that will take you dashing through Elliott Bay. Nimble raider that she is, Lynx last made that journey firing her carronades at tourists along Seattle’s waterfront.

For $150 you can board in Quartermaster Harbor on Vashon Island and return home as part of the Parade of Sail. Again, there will be cannon fire. Add to that the thrill of seeing the celebration from the deck of one of the parade’s stars.

Once the festival’s over, Lynx has berths for the sail north to Port Alberni, B.C., July 8-12. For $700, you’ll sleep in a curtained compartment in the main cabin, take your meals with the crew and learn about modern life aboard historic ships.

Lynx will hit the open ocean on the sail back down the coast to San Francisco July 13-18. You can test your sea legs on that voyage for $1,000.

Call me biased, because I sailed from Victoria to Tacoma aboard Lynx three years ago. And I’m from Baltimore, where Fells Point shipwrights built the original Lynx to harass British shipping during the War of 1812. So give me a choice between cruising on Lynx or a modern liner, and I’ll go for patriotic piracy true to our maritime heritage.

Interested? Log onto www.privateerlynx.org to learn about the ship. Then call Cindy Buffa of the Lynx Educational Foundation at 1-866-446-5969.

The Schooner Adventuress is on its way after passing Coast Guard inspection Tuesday, according to the Peninsula Daily News.

Here's the top of The Daily News story:

Twenty-nine hours after the schooner Adventuress went aground Monday in the San Juan Islands, tension turned to joy and relief when a U.S. Coast Guard inspector emerged late Tuesday afternoon with good news.

"Just a little ding," Steve Carlson told an elated Catherine Collins, executive director of Sound Experience, who embraced him for clearing the vessel so it could sail on to the Victoria and Tacoma tall ship festivals.

Read more here.

TV Tacoma, the city’s cable outlet, will broadcast the Tall Ships Tacoma Parade of Sail live on July 3.

The broadcast will begin at 11 a.m., according to a city press release. Each ship and facts about the vessels will be shown as they sail into the Thea Foss Waterway to begin the festival.

It will also be webcast live at tvtacoma.com and replayed over the next four days.

I just finished talking with David Doxtater, the executive director of Tall Ships Tacoma. They’re in the home stretch of preparing for July’s festival. The office was certainly busier than any other time I’ve visited, and Doxtater told me he recently moved into a Tacoma hotel so he can spend more time in the office and less time in his car commuting from Bainbridge Island.

Jason Hagey and I are working on a story for this weekend that catches the readers up with what the latest is with the event planning.

The number of ships is down to 31 from 32. The Army Reserve barge has dropped out. Event spokeswoman Lorraine Ralston said its place in the festival was tentative from the start, but the other 31 are still on schedule to pull into the Thea Foss Waterway on July 3.

“We’re bringing in a broader range of ships,” Doxtater said. “We have premium ships. We’ll have the Nina, the Bounty, the Kaisei, the Eagle.”

The anchor will be the Eagle, a 295-foot U.S. Coast Guard cutter. And it wasn't easy to book its appearance.

“We really led the charge,” he said. “We rallied the other (West Coast) Tall Ships events this summer. We got some congressmen involved. We went back to D.C. and did some lobbying. We helped convince them switch their schedule to the West Coast. They weren’t really planning to come here.”

=> Read more!

Gig Harbor-based Amazing Grace motors towards port to pick up additional crew members in downtown Tacoma with cargo ship Honest Spring moored in Commencement Bay behind. The 83-foot topsail schooner Amazing Grace is heading up to Canada for American Sail Training Association West Coast Challenge event next weekend and will return the following week for the Tall Ships 2008 festival. Russ Carmack/The News Tribune

Tugboats tie on to the schooner Adventuress after it ran aground Mondayat Orcas Island. No injuries were reported when the 95-year-old schooner ran aground at about noon in Wasp Passage in the San Juan Islands while sailing on a school trip. Jeff Chew/Peninsula Daily News

The Adventuress, an historic schooner scheduled to visit Tacoma next month for the Tall Ships 2008 festival, has run aground in Wasp Passage, the U.S. Coast Guard reported.

No injuries were reported and all passengers and crew were safely removed by the Washington State Ferry Sealth, and Vessel Assist, according to a Coast Guard press release issued this afternoon.

The cause of the grounding is unknown. No pollution was reported.

The nonprofit organization Sound Experience sails the 133-foot Adventuress as a training vessel.

It's one of three ships participating in Youth on Board, a project of Metro Parks Tacoma, Tall Ships Tacoma, Boys & Girls Club of South Puget Sound, and the Sea Scouts.

The 48 participants, all 14 to 17 years old, were scheduled leave Tacoma on June 29 for Vancouver Island.

UPDATE Here's more from The Associated Press.

“She’s a tough old ship,” said Catherine Collins, executive director of Sound Experience, the Port Townsend company that sails the two-masted schooner.

Collins said the sailboat had previously run aground in the 1960s and came out of the experience without a scratch.

“We’re not worried,” she said, adding that the ship was not taking on water. “As soon as the tide comes in, they’re going to float her.”
High tide was at 10:08 p.m. Monday.

The sailboat had 15 passengers and a crew of 12 on board when it went aground, Collins said.

I was part of the crowd that gathered this morning at the Foss Waterway to celebrate the conclusion of the first phase of the $24 million overhaul of the Balfour Dock Building.

The 108-year-old building is one two remaining wood warehouses built by the Northern Pacific Railroad as a "Mile Long" wheat warehouse. It was hailed as the original "Port of Tacoma."

Phase 1 of the overhaul consisted primarily of construction of an esplanade. The Balfour Dock will serve as home to the USCG Eagle next month.

I'll have a full report in Friday's paper, including parts of my interview with Harry "the horse" Hilliard, an 88-year former longshore worker who went to work at the building in 1947.

In the mean time, I posted the photo above showing the building now, and a couple historical photos below.

UPDATE: My story didn't make it Friday's paper, but it's on our Web site now. It will run in Saturday's print edition.

If you just don't appreciate the combination of engineering and history that make sailing ships so appealing, you're probably going to want to be out of town the first week of July. That's when the boats return for Tall Ships Tacoma 2008.

For the other 700,000 or so of you - judging by the crowds that showed up in 2005 - get ready to have some fun. At The News Tribune, we went a little overboard three years ago with our tall ships coverage - full page posters, pull out guides, saturation festival coverage. Readers loved it and so did we. We've been waiting for them to come back ever since.

We've been plotting this year's tall ships reporting plan for the past six months or so. It's safe to say that this year's coverage will exceed 2005's excessive coverage. Here are some of the highlights:

• We've started this Tall Ships blog to follow the latest about the festival and the ships. As we get closer to the event, it will become our vehicle for live coverage.

• We're creating a Tall Ships web page with archived stories, photo and multimedia galleries and festival information.

• We're sending columnist Kathleen Merryman and a photojournalist to cover the tail end of the Victoria, B.C., Tall Ships festival next week and then sail down from Victoria to Tacoma aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Eagle. You'll recall that Kathleen made a similar voyage aboard the Lynx during the 2005 festival, giving readers a taste of life on board.

• On Sunday, June 30, our major coverage kicks off with a front page preview of the event and a four-page commemorative section introducing the ships and previewing the festival. Our SoundLife section will start its week-long Tall Ships theme, which will include a look at Puget Sound nautical history, modern day pirates and cooking on a ship galley.

• We'll be checking in on the flotilla of tall ships as they head down Puget Sound and assemble in Quartermaster Harbor July 2 in preparation for the July 3 Parade of Sail. During the festival, we'll be offering daily coverage of the event from a crew of about a dozen photographers and reporters.

• Once again, we're planning two-page posters from our award-winning photo staff every day during the festival.

If you have tall ships stories you'd like to see, let me know and I'll see what we can do.

Ryan Koch, 11, plays with a viewing scope at the Columbia River Maritime Museum in Astoria in front of a window reflecting a moored USCGS Eagle Friday, June 13, 2008. The Eagle will headline Tall Ships Tacoma next month.
JOE BARRENTINE/The News Tribune

The Sea Scout Ship Odyssey is celebrating its 70th birthday with daylong festivities in downtown Tacoma on Saturday.

The Odyssey, an 88½-foot yawl that will participate in next month’s Tall Ships Tacoma festival, will be docked in the Thea Foss Waterway in front of the Museum of Glass. The celebration is held in conjunction with an exhibit on maritime history at the Washington State History Museum.

Events include:

• 11 a.m.-1:45 p.m.: A chance for the public to view and tour the boat for free.

• 2-4 p.m.: A sailing open to the public. Tickets are $25.

• 4-5 p.m.: Boat tours and a performance by the Shifty Sailors, a sea shanty and maritime music group.

• 5-7 p.m.: A charter sail with the Shifty Sailors

Cadets John W. Beal, left, Kyle E. Stubbs, center, and Trent A. Meyers pose on the deck of the USCGS Eagle Thursday, June 12, 2008. Stubbs, a native of Newcastle, Wash., will end his tour on the Eagle before Tall Ships Tacoma, but will be there in spirit, he says.
Photo by JOE BARRENTINE
Story by KATHLEEN MERRYMAN

Astoria, Ore. - There were no lines to tour U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Eagle Thursday evening in Astoria, just a steady stream of people delighted to have the chance to visit America’s Tall Ship.

Cadets Kyle Stubbs, 19, of Newcastle, and Trent Meyers of Indianapolis, Ind., manned the dock. They welcomed families, seniors, Coast guard veterans and tourists delighted to be in town at the same time as the famous ship. They assured all that they were welcome, and that there was no charge to tour the ship.

While Stubbs and Meyers greeted, other cadets in uniform shared pizza parlor flyers. The dialed their cell phones and tried to negotiate to have pies delivered to the city dock. It was surprisingly frustrating. They were assigned to the ship for the evening. They could not just wander off in search of a Hawaiian with extra Canadian bacon.
When they dock in Tacoma, they said, it would be a fine thing to have great pizza readily available, a great thing to allow pizza delivery people access to the ship.

“Pizza is a big thing cadets are fans of,” Stubbs said. “We don’t get it on ship.”

Cadets with shore leave waved goodbye as they set out to explore Astoria. It’s not a city that specializes in night life. At 10 p.m., groups of them were still walking about, looking at shop windows, enjoying the chance to walk more than 300 feet in one direction without having to turn around.

=> Read more!

Here's an Oregonian staff blog post on The Eagle's visit to Astoria.

A couple examines the rigging of the USCGS Eagle in Astoria, Ore. Thursday, June 12, 2008.

Nancy Cook and Zeti McKay stood at the highest spot in Astoria, looked down at the waterfront and picked out USCG Eagle’s masts. The new moms had hiked up to the Astoria Column carrying their baby girls, Izi Cook and Amelia McKay.

Every morning they listen to the Columbia River shipping report on their public radio station. Thursday, there’d been a live broadcast on Eagle’s arrival. In a community in which the Coast Guard is a proud and constant presence, the arrival of its oldest and most famous ship is a big deal.

People are just getting a grip on it, Cook said of the tall ship’s first visit to Astoria in nine years.

McKay was sure the patrons at her business, Coffee Girl Café, were sitting outside, looking down the river and planning visits to the barque. Heading back down the hill, McKay and Cook did their own planning.

“It’ll be the babies’ first time on a ship,” McKay said.

=> Read more!

The USCGC Eagle enters the Columbia river near Astoria, Ore. Thursday, June 12, 2008. The ship will moor at the city dock next to the maritime museum.

U.S.Coast Guard Cutter Eagle, half way between the Columbia Bar and Astoria's city dock, gave Robert Hutton a glorious start to his 41st birthday.

Hutton, of Cascade Locks, Ore., is spending a week at the coast. He just happened to be at Ft. Stevens as Eagle approached.

"It looks like it has big diesel engines," he said as Eagle motored toward him.

The American flag streamed over her stern.

Three Coast Guard rescue boats ran out to escort her in.

Around her, the people in 50 small boats were fishing for salmon.
Life's good on the coast. You can fish and get close to America's Tall Ship all before 9 a.m.

Gary and Jerrilyn French had been waiting, with cameras and binoculars, since 6:15 a.m.

"We're on our eighth year as campground hosts,"Jerrilyn said.

"We're with a group called Friends of Old Fort Stevens," Gary added.
The fort, he said, has guarded the mouth of the Columbia since the Civil War. The ditch behind them was once a moat.

Jerrilyn focused her 400mm lens on Eagle.

"This is just majestic," she said." It makes you feel proud of your country, very patriotic."

They'd read about Eagle's visit in The Daily Astorian, but did not know that she was heading to Victoria, B.C. and Tacoma for Tall Ships.

Kathleen Merryman and Joe Barrentine

The Amazing Grace, the Gig Harbor-based topsail schooner, still has some sailing opportunities left before and during the festival. The last one sounds like a blast, so to speak. From the press release:

Race on board Amazing Grace against the Eagle and a few other Tall Ships as they make their way from Victoria to Port Angeles on Monday June 30th. Only a hand-full of positions are available so call to learn more. (253) 857-0770

Cruise through the International Tall Ship fleet on board Amazing Grace, while the other ships are anchored in Quartermaster Harbor on Wednesday July 2nd. The 83 foot topsail schooner Amazing Grace will welcome the fleet as they arrive and anchor in Quartermaster in preparation for the official start of Tall Ships Tacoma the following morning. Cost is $150 per person and includes appetizers. (253) 857-0770

Canoneer positions are available for those who want the unique experience of battling another tall ship during one of the eleven cannon battles Amazing Grace will be engaged in during Tall Ships Tacoma. Cost is $250 per person. No previous cannon experience necessary but you must be able to obey the Captain! (253) 857-0770

Find out more about the ship here.

A party celebrating the 20th birthday of the Hawaiian Chieftain will be held in Westport on Thursday at 6 p.m. Tickets for the event are $50.

The Aberdeen-based ketch will be in Tacoma for the July Tall Ship Festival.

Click here for more info on the party or how you can donate gifts like knee breeches to the crew.

If you're hoping to get out on the water on one of the ships during the festival, you should buy your tickets soon. Last I checked, the ships were booking up fast.

There are still prime time sailings available during the Parade of Sail from Quartermaster Harbor to the Foss Waterway on July 3 and during Commencement Bay fireworks on July 4. Those once-in-a-lifetime excursions are going to cost you – as much as $200 a pop to sail on the Kaisei or Nina. On the other hand, there are an assortment of tickets left during other days of festival in the $40 to $100 neighborhood.

You can also go online to buy boarding passes - tickets to get on the ships along the Foss Waterway. A $10 daily general boarding pass will get you on the class "B" and "C" vessels. A $20 premium pass will also get you on the Class "A" ships - Niña, HMS Bounty and Kaisei. You can get a four-day all-vessel pass for $60. (The Coast Guard Eagle doesn't charge admission.)

You'll be able to buy boarding passes during the festival, but you might want to take advantage of the advanced sales, says Matthew Erlich, media director for Tall Ships Tacoma. "Generally, our goal would be to sell as many boarding passes as possible in advance – it would save on the lines people may face at the event and get them in line more quickly to actually board the ships," he says.

To buy tickets or boarding passes, go to the Tall Ships Web site.

Tall Ships and Tacoma history buffs might want to catch a couple of events next week.

On Monday, June 9, maritime historian Chuck Fowler will give a talk on his book "Tall Ships On Puget Sound," a pictorial history of ships in the region. The free presentation at the Tacoma Historical Society meeting starts at 7 p.m. in the Carnegie Building at the Tacoma Public Library, 1102 Tacoma Ave. South.

Fowler is also featured next Saturday, June 14, at a Washington State History Museum event: "Ships, Sailors, and Sounds of the Sea — Celebrating Washington's Maritime History." The event also features Deb Lund, author of the children's book "Dino Sailors" and a performance by Whidbey Island maritime music group The Shifty Sailors. The fun starts at 11 a.m. and is free with museum admission.

For information on other community events check out the Tall Ships Tacoma Web site.

The Coast Guard has issued boating regulations for this summer’s Tall Ships Tacoma festival.

A 50-yard safety zone will be in place around every Tall Ship in Puget Sound during the July 3-7 event, according to a press release. Security boats will accompany each ship. If an intruding vessel does not leave the safety zone after being told, its description and registration will be recorded and handed over to law enforcement or the Coast Guard.

There are also rules that apply to specific waterways:

Quartermaster Harbor: There will be a safety zone in Quartermaster Harbor from 7 a.m. to approximately 6 p.m. on July 3 as the tall ships prepare to depart for the Parade of Sail. No boats will be allowed to transit Quartermaster Harbor during this time without permission from the U.S. Coast Guard’s Captain of the Port, Puget Sound.

This safety zone begins at a line crossing the harbor entrance approximately at Manzanita Point near the red navigation aid number “2” and extends to the north end of the harbor. Boats attempting to enter the harbor during this time will be turned away.

To contact the Captain of the Port before July 3, boaters should call the U.S. Coast Guard Sector Seattle at 206.217.6001. Once the safety zone goes into effect, boaters should contact the U.S. Coast Guard or any law enforcement vessel in the vicinity on VHF Channel 16 or Channel 22A.

Ruston Way: There will be a safety zone along Ruston Way from 7 a.m. to approximately 6 p.m. on July 3 during the Parade of Sail. The safety zone includes all water from the Tacoma Yacht Club southeast for four nautical miles along Ruston Way to the entrance of the Foss Waterway and out 400 yards from shore for the entire length. U.S. Coast Guard, Coast Guard auxiliary, U.S. Army Reserve, Tacoma Police Department and Tall Ships® Tacoma event security boats will mark the safety zone boundaries. During this time, no unauthorized boats of any size or propulsion will be allowed to enter, be underway, be anchored, or be tied to any log boom or buoy within the safety zone. A boat may remain tied to a permanent moorage or dock within the zone but may not depart that moorage while the safety zone is in effect.

Boaters who plan to tie to a log boom or anchor in the vicinity of the Freedom Fair air show and fireworks display on July 4 should be aware of the new safety regulation in effect on July 3.

A Tacoma Fire boat will lead the Parade of Sail and is expected to put on a water spray demonstration that will extend 50 yards to the port and starboard of the vessel. Spectator boats are advised to stay at least 50 yards away from the vessels in the parade.

Foss Waterway: The tall ships will be moored in the Foss Waterway from July 3-7. Spectator boats are welcome to use the waterway to view the ships but should remain at least 50 feet from any vessel. Marina tenants will be allowed to depart or return to their slips. Tall Ships® Tacoma event security boats will patrol the waterway and remind boaters of safety clearances.

There will be significant boat traffic in the Foss Waterway during the festival and the moving safety zones will be in effect around every event ship. All boaters should exercise care when transiting the waterway and travel at no-wake speeds.

Periodically, festival security boats may need to stop boat traffic in the Foss Waterway while one of the tall ships is maneuvering into its berth. These interruptions will be of short duration and are necessary for the safety of all boats and persons.

Sailing Adventures: Many of the tall ships will depart the Foss Waterway each day for sailing adventures in Commencement Bay. During these sailing adventures, spectator boats must remain at least 50 yards away from the vessels. Volunteer boats will escort the vessels during their sails to maintain the safety zone.

We're putting together what we hope will be the definitive guide to enjoying Tall Ships Tacoma 2008 and need your help.

From those of you who attended the festival in 2005, we're looking for tips for enjoying this year's event. For instance:

• Where are the best places to watch the Parade of Sail?

• What were your favorite ships and on-shore attractions?

• Ideas for navigating the festival, getting there, getting around, when to go, etc.

• What did you wish you knew last time that you'll know this time?

Respond on the comments to this post.