Bryan Cargill spent only three nights aboard a Tall Ship, but the 16-year-old from University Place was already talking like a seasoned sea veteran.

“They put me in charge of the portside jib sheet,” Cargill, a student at Curtis High School, said Wednesday. “We raised it, lowered it, luffed it.”

Luffing, Cargill explained, is when the crew pulls the sail and allows it to flutter in the wind.

“I hadn’t known that before this trip,” he said. “And I probably wouldn’t have known it if I hadn’t signed up.”

He thanks Youth on Board for that.

Cargill served aboard the Zodiac and was among 47 teenagers in the program, a project of Metro Parks Tacoma, Tall Ships Tacoma, Boys & Girls Club of South Puget Sound and the Sea Scouts. The participants, all 14 to 17 years old, served aboard one of three Tall Ships to learn the basics of sailing. Few had spent any considerable time aboard a ship before.

The crew left Tacoma on Sunday to meet their ships in Victoria, B.C., where a Tall Ships festival was ending. They spent three nights on board, working like a full-time crew member. For some, that meant waking in the middle of the night to perform a watch. For others, it meant learning hand signals to communicate with other ships.

=> Read more!

Brent Mills’ two children had one goal when as they walked into the Quartermaster Harbor marina.

“They want to see some pirate ships,” he said. “They’re really excited.”

Mills, who lives in Seattle during the week and on Vashon Island on weekends, admits he’s a bit of a “boat guy.” He and his two children, 9-year-old Jackson and 7-year-old Zoe, spent four hours paddling from their weekend home to the marina yesterday in hopes of catching a glimpse of a few of the Tall Ships.

They didn’t see any. And the three drove to Dockton Park today.

“I’m still feeling it,” he said.

Zoe cut him off.

“Dad just let us ride most of the way here yesterday,” she said.

Almost a hundred people at mid-afternoon walked across the marina to try to find the best view of the ships. Dozens of other cars circled the street looking for a parking spot, and some resorted to leaving their cars on the shoulder of the road.

The view from the elevated parking lot was just fine for John and Julie Beeler. The Des Moines couple leaned against the side of their white GMC Yukon Denali and watched the Tall Ships sail into Quartermaster Harbor. John, 66, looked through binoculars as boat carried Youth on Board participants off the Zodiac and onto Argosy Cruises’ Spirit of Seattle.

Julie, 62, seemed just as content to soak up some rays as she watched from afar.

“It’s a beautiful day to be out here,” Julie said.

If you’re watching a reenactment of a cannon battle during Tall Ships Tacoma this week, just remember one thing: Those charges could’ve made some buttery, fluffy biscuits.

Tim Jovanovich and Avio Brooklyn spent much of Wednesday sitting aboard the Bounty of Krister and building cannon charges for the reenactments. They wrapped aluminum foil around a wooden cylinder to create the shape, removed the wood and filled the foil with about 30 cubic centimeters of black gunpowder.

That creates the boom. Bisquick creates the show.

“Bisquick’s a pretty good filler,” said Brooklyn, 15-year-old student at Vashon Island High School. “It makes more white smoke the charges explode.”

Tacoma Link will be running longer hours during the Tall Ships Festival, according to Sound Transit.

Transit officials want visitors to ride a bus to Tacoma, then hop on the Link or a shuttle to get down to the water.

Here's the press release:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — July 2, 2008

Extra Tacoma Link service on tap for Tall Ships event

Tacoma Link will offer extended service hours during the Tall Ships Festival this weekend along the Thea Foss waterway in downtown Tacoma. Parking for the event will be at the Tacoma Dome, with easy access to the Tacoma Dome Link station at 424 E. 25th St.

On Thursday, July 3, Tacoma Link will run on its normal weekday schedule. On Friday through Sunday, July 4 through 6, Link will operate on a Saturday schedule, with the last train departing the Theater District Station at 11:10 p.m. On Monday, July 7, the last day of the Tall Ships Festival, Tacoma Link will operate on its normal weekday schedule.

Two downtown stops offer convenient access to the Tall Ships Festival entrances.
· Union Station at South 19th Street (walk to the festival across the Bridge of Glass)
· Convention Center at South 15th Street (walk to festival via the 15th Street ramp)

The Tall Ships Festival in 2005 brought record-breaking ridership to Tacoma Link. Numerous festival-goers are expected to use Tacoma Link again this year to explore the 32 sailing vessels featured in this year’s event.

Visitors from around the region are encouraged to take transit to the festival and avoid parking. Regular weekday Sounder service will run between Seattle and Tacoma on Thursday, July 3. Many ST Express, Pierce Transit, and other regularly scheduled transit services can take Tall Ships festival-goers to the Tacoma Dome Station where they can access Tacoma Link and shuttle service to the waterfront.

To get to Tacoma Dome Station:
· From downtown Seattle, take ST Express buses 590, 591, 592, and 594
· From SeaTac, Kent, Des Moines or Federal Way, take ST Express bus 574
· From Bonney Lake, Sumner or Puyallup, take ST Express bus 582
· From Lakewood, take ST Express buses 574 or 594

For more information about bus routes, connections, and Tacoma Link service, go to www.soundtransit.org

Capt. Christopher Sinnett first came aboard U.S.C.G. Barque Eagle as most Coast Guard officers do – as a cadet.

“I grew up in a military family,” Sinnett said in the ship’s wardroom Wednesday. “I understood and liked the military lifestyle. I was on the wrestling team and a competitive sailor.”

He’d looked at other military academies, but none of them had anything to compare to the ship he now commands.

“I was aware of Eagle and knew I wanted to get on board. I wanted to be on board under sail in a lot of wind, and to be climbing the rigging when the ship was moving underneath.”

He trained on her in the summers of 1979 and 1980, when the Iranian hostage crisis and the Mariel boatlift off Cuba dominated headlines.

“It was a very active time in world and Coast Guard affairs,” he said of the big picture.

For him, though, those summers were about the adventure of learning the ship and the teamwork required to sail and maintain her.

“At that point it did not mean as much to me as it does now,” he said. “The more life experience you get, the more you understand the history that lives on in Eagle.”

Eagle was built in 1936 as a sail training ship named the Horst Wessel.

“This was a propaganda stunt on the part of the Nazis,” Sinnett said. “Hitler chose the name.

Wessel and Hitler had fought together during World War I, and they remained friends.

“Horst Wessel had written a marching song that Hitler liked,” Sinnett said. “He made it the marching song of the German military. Before World War II, Wessell was killed by a jealous ex-boyfriend of the woman he was living with. The Nazis used that for propaganda, because the jealous boyfriend was a communist.”

Hitler and his cohorts were whipping up propaganda casting communists as the enemy, and Horst Wessell shot dead on his doorstep fit right in.

“It was that whole ‘a patriot of the revolution assassinated by the communists’ thing,” Sinnett said.

So hull No. 508 in the Blohm and Voss Shipyard was destined to be named for Hitler’s song-writing friend.

Hull No. 509 would be named for Otto Von Bismarck.

We’ve had British people come on board,” Sinnett said. “I take them aft, where the original construction still exists, and they learn that this ship was probably built within 100 yards of the Bismarck. They take this breath. They pause for a second when it hits them what that means.”

The Horst Wessel was a smokescreen as much as she was a sailing ship.

Under the treaty of Versailles, Germany was banned from building a warfighting navy.

“The reason the Germans were building sail training ships is they were prohibited from building naval warfighting vessels per the Treaty of Versailles after World War I,” Sinnett said. “The sail training ships were being used to train the sailors going into the warfighting arena. The original engine in here was the same type that was being installed in the U-boats when Hitler was illegally rebuilding the German navy. They were training U-boat engineers and sailors for their warfighting ships.”
During the war, the ship served mainly as a troop transport. It had anti-aircraft guns, which it fired at Allied planes. There are stories, but no record that it hit anything.

At war’s end, three of Hitler’s sail training ships remained to be claimed as war prizes.

“In 1946, the American team led by U.S.C.G Cmdr. Gordon McGowan found Eagle in the bombed out city of Bremerhaven,” Sinnett said. “They spent months working with members of the former German crew to get her back in working condition. She had deteriorated during the latter stages of the war. They got some of the crew out of POW camps. The Germans had to interpret the placards on the ship.

They sailed her back to the United States, encountering a massive hurricane along the way to New York City.

“Everybody worked together,” Sinnett said. “In 1946, they pulled into New York City with some of the sails in tatters, but the ship intact. They made some cursory repairs and finished the transit to the (U.S. Coast Guard) academy in New London. She started work immediately.”

Since then, the Coast Guard has reconfigured the berths, replaced the power plant and water and sewer systems. But the rigging, the masts and hull are original. Throughout the ship, there are tokens of her first life – photographs of her under construction and berthed in Bremerhaven, brass plates bearing her original name.

“What made Eagle a valuable training platform in her first days is the same thing that makes her valuable today,’ Sinnett said. “Technology changes. People don’t. The challenge of going to sea is the same for today for an 18- or 19-year-old as it was for a teen prior to WWII. It’s achieving personal goals and working together as a team to achieve the unit goals, which translates into accomplishing the mission. That’s what the American public wants. They want us to accomplish the mission.”

There’s one more lesson in Eagle’s history, Sinnett said.

“Where you start does not dictate where you end or what your journey is. Eagle started life as the Horst Wessel, working for what is arguably the most evil regime in the history of the planet, and has spent the last 62 years working for the United States, teaching others how to save lives and to conduct humanitarian missions.

You could get keel-hauled. Or you could get Raisched.

Bos’n Keith Raisch has served aboard Eagle, as he says, “a substantial period of time. Enough so that most officers today know my name.”

And not in a soft, cuddly way.

He is known for hurling obscure questions at cadets, and, when they do no know the answer, barking “GO FIND OUT!”

GFO, for short.

He is proud that cadets have put an acronym to his name: Recruited And Involuntarily Selected for Climbing and Hauling.

That means that if they flunk a pop quiz, or happen to be skylarking around the ship, he’ll find them something “challenging” to do.

Here’s a sample of things you’ll need to know if you run into Bos’n Raisch aboard Eagle:

Q: How many transverse water-tight bulkheads does Eagle have? What and where are they?

GFO: Eight. The ship is sectioned into segments to protect its water-tight integrity, which protects all aboard. A bulkhead is a solid steel wall that runs from side to side and from the keel to the main deck. They are at frames 10, 25, 37, 49, 63, 75, 90 and 107.

“Mariners all over the world stole the idea from the Chinese, who put them in junks,” Raisch said, giving you the opportunity for a bonus point.

Q: How many emergency escape scuttles or trunks does Eagle have? Where are they? And what are they?

GFO: A scuttle is a small circular hatch just big enough for a person to get through should the ship head for the bottom. Scuttles lead from any of the lower compartments where people live or work to the main deck or the weather deck.

Eagle has nine of them.

Q: What’s a sea painter?

GFO: It’s a rope used to position a small boat alongside the ship under the davits so it can be picked up, or to keep the boat alongside when it is launched.

Q: What does is mean to pay the devil?

GFO: In wooden ships, planks have caulking in between them. It was usually cotton and tarred oakum. On a long transit, as the hull would shrink and expand, the caulking would come out or leak.

“The stuff below the water they could not do anything about. The stuff above the water was easy,” Raisch said. “The one at the water’s edge was always very difficult to deal with. It became known as the devil. Replacing the caulking was known as paying the caulk, so for this particular plank, it was known as paying the devil. It was not uncommon to wind up between the devil and the deep blue sea.

So where is the influx of visitors to Vashon Island coming from?

Apparently not from the South Sound. Or at least not in the totally nonscientific poll I just took.

My sample set consisted of the eight people sitting at three outdoor tables at Casa Bonita, a Mexican restaurant in Vashon.

I managed to ask where they were from while they chowed down on enchiladas and other good stuff. Three are from Bellevue, three from Seattle, one from Kirkland and one from White Center.

So, South Sounders, where are you?

(Of course, if one is taking the ferry from Point Defiance, it might not be the wisest idea to drive past Quartermaster Harbor and into town just to drive south again to see the ships.)

The four-way intersection of Vashon Highway and Bank Road is the closest thing Vashon Island has to a commercial district. Still, it’s not quite busy enough to necessitate a traffic light; stop signs will do.

But dozens of cars – most heading southbound on Vashon Highway toward Quartermaster Harbor – jammed the intersection early this afternoon. It wasn’t quite Interstate 405 during rush hour, but the island’s residents noticed the swell in cars.

“It’s almost like a traffic jam,” Vashon resident James Robertson said. “It isn’t easy to figure out why, either.”

Before the white, fluttering sails of the ships come in tomorrow, the pointy, white tents of vendors are sprouting up on seemingly every inch of Foss Waterway's waterfront.

Set up in downtown Tacoma has been going on for four days now, and it is nearing crunch time before Tall Ships begins, Tall Ships spokesman Matthew Erlich said. And there is a lot more work to be done before everything is ready.

But is there a deadline?

"Well, it's when the event starts," he said.

It is hard not to respect all of the planning that went in to the event. Volunteers hastily drive up and down the waterfront, talking on radios in their Club Cars while trucks full of food and tents meander to their spot on the waterway.

I almost get hit by a tiny ice cream vending car while standing in front of a tent for an insurance company. Ironic.

It looks like Taste of Tacoma part deux, but beginning tomorrow, the main event comes in, bringing hundreds of thousands of people along.

At least the thousands will be well fed.
— Brian Everstine, The News Tribune

Peter VanVynck, left, with Carpenters Union Local 1797 in Renton, and John Absten, with Carpenters Union Local 470 in Tacoma work on a temporary gangway on the Foss Waterway, Wednesday, as preparations for Tall Ships Tacoma 2008 looms less than 24-hours away.

JOE BARRENTINE/The News Tribune

Jenny Davis had already beaten the crowds for a prime spot. That was the easy part.

The moon’s gravitational pull flustered her a bit more.

“If I sit here, I’ll have a great spot,” she told me. “But if the tides come up, then I’ll have to move. But is this low tide? High tide? I just don’t want to screw this up.”

The 52-year-old from West Seattle was trying to determine the perfect spot near Dockton Park upon which to plant a blue canvas camping chair. She has been waiting for this day – when the participating boats in the Tall Ships Tacoma festival pull into Quartermaster Harbor – for more than three years. She had planned to be on Vashon Island during the 2005 festival but caught a stomach bug and missed the entire event.

“I was so disappointed,” she said, clutching my right arm for emphasis. “So, so disappointed.”

That led to her early arrival this year. She was one of only a handful of people at the park which sits on the northwestern coast of Maury Island. The low tide had sucked away much of the water, leaving an expanse of gushy mud underfoot. The legs of Davis’ camping chair sunk in the muck, and her shoes were caked with the stuff.

She didn’t mind all that. She just didn’t want the water to rise again and rob her of what she believes will be the prime ship-viewing spot.

“I don’t live on the water,” she said, “so I’m not sure how to figure this out. But I’m going to make it happen.”

Tacoma's Murray Morgan Bridge will be raised at 7:30 a.m. Thursday and stay that way for five days, the Washington state Department of Transportation announced today.

But it's got nothing to do with the condition of the beloved but rusting span that DOT officials may lock in the upright position later this or early next year.

This particular opening will allow ships to navigate the Thea Foss Waterway during the Tall Ships festival without repeatedly raising and lowering the bridge, according to the press release.

The bridge was closed to vehicles in October, and only about 40 pedestrians per day are using it now, the DOT said.

To read the full release, click for more:

=> Read more!

All my life, I’ve been afraid of heights.

It’s a legitimate fear. Lots of people have it. But I’ve come to use it as an excuse. I’ve depended on it to keep me off of steep, narrow mountain trails, driving the Going To The Sun Highway in Montana’s Glacier National Park and scampering to the tall parts of tall ships.

Reporters can do that. Photographers can’t.

Janet Jensen, who is shooting the glorious pictures you’re seeing of Eagle, is, as she puts it, “not fond of heights.”

I had no idea. Any time she has needed the advantage of height for a shot, she had shimmied into a safety harness and, accompanied by a cadet, climbed up the ratlines and over into the tops.
She does it, she said, by using her professionalism to stifle her fears.

Reporters can take notes from just about anywhere, and I prefer deck level.

Lt. Chris Nolan has, from the start, assumed that I would, and probably should, climb the rigging. To do so would give me an idea of how cadets turn a challenge into a favorite part of their duty aboard this ship.

So, every evening, about an hour before sunset, he has reminded me that I should go up. Every evening, I have managed to become engrossed in a compelling interview until the sun’s gone down. Until Tuesday.

There it was, a big red ball, sinking into the Olympics. And there he was, Lt. Nolan, smiling, telling me I could do it.

I snapped and cinched myself into a harness under the tutelage of senior cadet Ron Vyas, 21. “You can do it,” he said.

The rules are simple, he said. Never put two feet on the same horizontal line at the same time. Never hold onto line. Trust only the cables running from the deck to the mast. Attach the harness clip to the rigging any time you stop.

“You can do it, ma’am,” Vyas said with the kind of gentle reassurance one does not expect from a 21-year-old.

He even had me believing it.

With Seattle’s skyline coming to light behind me, I stepped onto the ship’s rail and started climbing the ratlines at about one fifth of cadet speed.

The ratlines form a tall, skinny triangle made of cable and line. Thirty feet up, I clipped on to get my bearings. Around 40 feet up, the courses narrow, which meant my ladder changed shape.

“You can do it,” Vyas told me.

“You can do it,” Nolan said, looking down from the platform.

=> Read more!