If you can find a more senior member than Elenore Kaiser on any Tall Ships crew, she would like to meet that person.

Kaiser is the Nina’s cook, and she runs the ship’s gift shop. She is a proud 81.

You might have bought your $5 commemorative pin from her, or your $20 Nina hat. If you did, she likely introduced herself to you as Miss Elli, the first mate’s mom.

She figures he saved her life.

“Ten years ago, my husband passed away, very suddenly,” she said. “We had been married 46 years, and he had a heart attack. I was completely lost.”

Her volunteer job as a church secretary was not enough to bring her back to her moorings.

“My kids decided I needed something to do,” she said. “Bless their hearts, it was the best thing they have ever done for me.”

Capt. Morgan Sanger was redecking Nina, the grim little replica of Columbus’ favorite ship. It is literally, pitch black, inside and out. It is allergic to even the smallest of comforts. Morgan wants visitors to leave it giving thanks for how cushy their lives are in comparison.

Miss Elli gets a kick out of the fact that Sanger goes by Captain Morgan. “Like the spiced rum,” she said.

During that re-fit eight years ago, Nina’s first mate, Jeffrey “Doc” Kaiser, called his mom and asked if she would take the train from her home in Almagordo, N.M., to Florida to help with the cooking, washing, shopping and errands.

“They thought it would take a month to six weeks,” she said. “That six weeks has become eight seasons. I have my own bunk. The captain says that when Miss Elli comes back, she gets that bunk no matter what.”

It would be charitable to say that, below-decks, Nina is cramped. Miss Elli is petite, which is why she does not bump her head on the low, dark, timbers.

“It’s cozy,” she said. “But she bobs like a cork. We had a bad storm coming down. I cracked a rib or two when I got knocked out of my bunk.”

She’s fine now, she said, and she’s fallen in love.

“It used to be that Chicago and Detroit were the best ports. Tacoma has surpassed it all,” she said. “If we say we need ice, it’s here in half an hour. They sent over boxes of vegetables yesterday, and fruit the day before. The attitude is so much better here than anywhere else.”

Thank you, Miss Elli. Come back any time, with or without your grim, beloved Nina.
.

By Kathleen Merryman
kathleen.merryman@thenewstribune.com

Last Wednesday, I posted this on our Tall Ships 2008 the blog. Since then, every time I looked at the Eagle’s mast, I said, I should have made it up and over.
Here’s the back story:
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 shot the glorious pictures you saw of the U.S. Coast Guard Barque Eagle, is, as she puts it, “not fond of heights.”
I had no idea. Any time she needed the advantage of height for a shot, she 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, the Eagle’s third officer, assumed 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, on the evenings I was aboard the Eagle, about an hour before sunset, he reminded me that I should go up. Every evening, I managed to become engrossed in a compelling interview until the sun went down. Until last 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 could climb the ratlines to a metal platform 60 feet above the deck.
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 a 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,” said Vyas, who was helping me.
Nolan, who climbed onto the platform from the other side, looked down on us. “You can do it,” he said.
I began to believe them. Very slowly, clipping on at every advance, I went up until my head was just under the triangular platform.
Sailors call the platforms “tops.” That’s short for “fighting tops.”
In the age of war under sail, snipers of the Royal Marines would climb the ratlines, stand on the tops and shoot at sailors on the decks of enemy ships.
Back then, some tops had “lubber holes,” hatches in the deck of the tops. Landlubbers could climb the ratlines, then just pop into the top.
The Eagle’s tops have no lubber holes. The platform is the tricky part. The lines look as though they require a climber to bend backwards and climb over the edge of the platform. There’s a turn in the route, which would be no problem at all to negotiate say, 3 feet off the ground.
Sixty feet in the air, it stopped me.
“You can do it,” Nolan and Vyas told me. “You can clip on.”
I did not believe them. I made it up, but not over.
Lt. Mike Keyser of the Eagle hates heights, too. But he has made it up and over at least five times.
“Try again,” he said. “You can do it.”
Sunday, I tried again. At the festival I ran into Tacoma police Sgt. C.P. Taylor, who said, “You can do it. You know you can do it.”
Police community liaison officer Bert Hayes, whom I’ve known for several years and like, said, “And if you can’t, you’re sniveling whiner.
“Carpe diem,” said Taylor, urging me to seize the day.
Or, if you’re on the ratlines, anything that’s metal.
That’s what I did. Bos’n’s mate Ken McSherry allowed me onboard and said he’d take me up and over.
He did. We made it to the top, over the edge and onto the platform.
It and the rigging were the same. But trying to come close to the Eagle’s standards made all the difference in me.
I may be a sniveling whiner, but I made it up one set of ratlines, over the fighting top and down the ratlines on the opposite side.

Tall Ships organizers are being conservative with their crowd estimates this time around.

Festival spokesman Matt Erlich said they estimated a total of 200,000 by noon on Saturday, and another 150,000 by 6 p.m. on Sunday.

You might remember that in 2005, Tall Ships took guff for an exuberant estimate of about a million visitors. They later reduced that to 700,000, counting the people who came out in boats, lined the Ruston Way shoreline, dropped big bucks at the fair, and boarded the ships.

This year, they are being more cautious. They’re counting the people who use the $10 parking at the Tacoma Dome lots, and they are getting crowd estimates from the police.

They are not counting the people who found street parking in Tacoma, or used the transit lots by Freighthouse Square. Those, at 1 p.m. Sunday, were full.

Whilst sauntering through Trade Winds village, particularly Captain Kidd's Cove, I noticed that female pirates significantly outnumbered their male counterparts. Why this gender imbalance, considering that piracy wasn't exactly the most female-friendly profession?

Nena "Barakuda" Boyer of Shelton offered one explanation. "Once you put kids into play, you need women to draw them in," she said. "Men can come off as too gruff."

Bellevue's Allan "Bartholomew Heart" Seuss interpreted the mini-trend as a long-delayed homage to female buccaneers.

"In history, there have been female pirateers," he said. "You just don't hear about them."

Tongue firmly in cheek, Robbin "Black Widow" Emery said that her crew was on the lookout for a "robust" male captain. "You must be a manly-man pirate to handle some of these wenches."

Touché.

Welcome aboard Washington State’s unladylike Lady.
Every day in port, two of Lady Washington’s doughty crew spend an hour belowdecks, packing black powder and tinfoil into tubes. Then gunner Sam Riggs, who has dreadlocks and piercing a pirate queen might envy, brings them up to her guns aft and amidships in a red box covered with “I (heart) black powder” and “I (heart) explosives” bumper stickers.
Sunday, Riggs was an inspiration to another Samantha: Samantha Folk, 6, and a student at Cascade Christian School, was heavily, if only temporarily, tattooed, when she boarded the Lady for a morning Battle Sail.
Lady, Hawaiian Chieftain, Lynx and Amazing Grace have been making three battle sails a day since Friday. That’s nine hours a day on Commencement Bay, shooting at each other to the delight of the likes of young Samantha.
But it’s not all fun and explosives.
There are rules to the privateer life, as Steward Beth Loudon told the passengers.
Stay clear of the block-and-tackle they call “The Widowmaker” on the foc’sl. If it breaks loose while crew are hoisting sail, you don’t want it living up to its name on your head.
Don’t put the baby down by the scuppers. “They’ve been known to swallow bags,” Loudon said of the drainage holes in the hull. “Please keep small children clear of them.”
And stay clear of the gunner and the 3-foot fireball she generates every time she lights a fuse.
Three years ago, Joe Bartlett, a mild-mannered City of Tacoma Public Safety Division employee took a sail on the wild side. He was impressed, in the traditional sense.
Lady Washington commandeered his body and stole his soul. She beckoned him back for sail training and brought him on as crew. Now, every vacation, he jumps into funnies and sets sail.
Funnies, he said, are the ship’s vintage costumes and come in two sizes: “Too big and too small,” he said. “I have my own, now.”
His daughter, Wendy Bartlett, started out on Lady, crewed on the X. E. Johnson and Irving Johnson out of Los Angeles, and chimes in on Tall Ships sites on My Space. She’s adding to the You Might Be A Tall Ship Sailor definitions there.
Joe’s favorite: “You might be a Tall Ship sailor if you meet a person of the opposite sex and wonder how hot and well-built their shower is.”
Bartlett might have said more, but skipper Evil Ryan Meyer barked an order.
“They call me Evil,” he told the passengers. “Don’t ask why.”
You might embarrass him if you did. He got the name when he lost a game of pick-up-sticks.
If you live and work aboard Tall Ships, and your moniker is Evil Ryan, you’d best have a battle plan.
“You are always trying to maneuver the boat into a position to fire the broadside guns lengthwise down the other vessel,” he said. “The farther the cannonball travels inside a boat, the more damage it is going to do.”
There was a time, he said, when captains would sail alongside one another and fire broadsides.
“That’s when soldiers wore bright uniforms and stood in straight lines,” Evil Ryan said. “They eventually realized that you had a longer life expectancy if you ducked.”
So privateers like the original Lynx, built in Baltimore’s Fells Point, darted up, fired, and sped away while crew on bulky British warships yelled “That’s cheating!”
If you were scoring a cannon fight, which Evil Ryan has not been doing during the festival, you’d get a point for a broadside, two for a bow shot and three if you hit the bow and messed up the steering.
At Tall Ships, you get points for pleasing the crowd with a big noise.
The Lady’s Captain Rob Mizer fielded a request radioed in from shore. A boat carrying passengers with handicaps would be coming up the port side. Would he be kind enough to fire on it?
He was.
And when the skipper of the Virginia V sashayed past, just begging for gunpowder, he obliged again. The passengers cheered.
Randy Marquis, a Tacoma Public Utilities employee was not as pleased. He’s a volunteer fireman on the old Mosquito Fleet ferry.
“I basically keep the engine oiled,” he said.
That’s what he was doing when Gunner Sam let loose.
“Geez,” he said later. “I thought the boiler blew up. You could feel the concussion coming through the hull.”
Lynx could not let a battle sail pass without sneaking up on her old adversary.
Friday evening, her gunner, Billy Gernertt, had lit the fuse and yelled “Live Free or Die!” as he fired on Lady.
Sunday morning, Gunner Sam lit the fuse and crew member “Preston “Wiggles” Nirattisai shouted “Live Free or Die Hard!” as they delivered a close broadside to Lynx.
“You missed!” someone yelled back at him from 10 feet across the water.
Lady, meanwhile, was a sitting duck for a sneak attack from below.
Amazing Grace crew member Peter Denton had grabbed his wooden sword, jumped ship and boarded Lady from the water.
Within a minute, he was captured, disarmed and held up for ransom from his former shipmates.
“I am hoping for ice cream,” Evil Ryan said. “Maybe a cake.”
It was not to be.
Someone aboard Lady threw Denton a line. Both captains maneuvered their boats close togther, and Denton swung home in fine Johnny Depp style.
The ships motored home together.
Another day. Another battle sail.

An Army landing craft is offering free tours of Foss Waterway both today and tomorrow. Excursions are every half hour, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Board at Thea's Park.

Tomorrow is Military Appreciation Day at the festival, which means that all active service members and their families receive half off the price of premium and regular access boarding tickets.

Hedy Woods is no stranger to the U.S. Coast Guard Eagle.

She played on its decks as a child in New London, Conn. She traveled to Mobile, Ala., to see the ship during the city’s tricentennial celebration in 2002. And the promise of seeing the three-masted barque again drew her from her home in Nashville to Tall Ships Tacoma 2008.

“I follow the Eagle,” the 66-year-old said. “I knew there would be a festival of ships, and I wanted to see the Eagle again.”

It’s a family affair, she explained.

Woods’ father, Frederick Swanson, was on the original American crew to sail the ship from Germany to the United States.

“He had to translate between the different sets of sailors to keep the ship running straight,” she said. “It must have been fascinating.”

Swanson was still a young child when his mother died, so his father sent him to live with grandparents in Germany. He returned to the United States after completing high school and joined the Coast Guard.

Germany handed over the Eagle after its defeat in World War II, and the Coast Guard asked Swanson to sail with it because he was bilingual.

During the trip to Alabama, the officer of the day showed her photos kept in the captain’s safe. On one of the photos, she said, was a man she was certain was her father.

“She was going through things pretty quick, and I didn’t want to interrupt her,” Woods said. “But I was stunned. Just absolutely stunned.”

Swanson couldn’t make it; he spends most of his days in an assisted-living facility outside Coral Gables, Fla.

“He has Alzheimer’s,” Woods said, “but when someone mentions the Coast Guard or the Eagle, he perks right up. He won’t forget that.”

More motivation to get out early today: At 10:30 a.m., the Tacoma Symphony Orchestra will be performing at the Treasure Cove stage in Thea's Park in honor of the armed services. The orchestra will be fortuitously positioned in front of the Eagle as well, so don't forget to bring your cameras.