Hundreds gathered on the docks of the Thea Foss Waterway to bid farewell to the U.S. Coast Guard Eagle, the 266-foot three-masted barque that became the centerpiece attraction of Tall Ships Tacoma 2008.

As the ship pulled away, festival attendees clapped and waved good-bye. Several coasties aboard waved back.

“It was so amazing to see that ship,” Puyallup’s Lana Daniels said. “I’ll miss it. Let’s just hope it’s back next time around.”

I’m asking an array of people if they thought this year’s festival was a success.

First up was Tom Cashman, the executive director of the Foss Waterway Seaport. The organization’s museum was free during the event, and it saw record attendance: more than 15,000 people on Friday, about 10,000 each on Saturday and Sunday and likely a little less today.

“Clearly, the scale of this is tremendous,” Cashman said. “We’re extremely, extremely happy.”

The crowds are lighter. The lines are shorter. And the sun is shining.

This is the day to be at Tall Ships

Well, now that the sun is out, the ships are leaving - but you still have one more day to enjoy Tall Ships Tacoma 2008. The News Tribune crew will be seeing off the Eagle, which is pulling out in early afternoon, and pulling together an initial post mortem on the event.

If you attended the festival, we'd love to hear from you about your experiences. What were your favorite parts? What could have festival organizer done better? Should Tacoma try to host another festival in the future?

Comment here or send an e-mail to newstips@thenewstribune.com.

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.

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.”

Festival spokesman Matthew Erlich says organizers estimate that 200,000 people attended the festival between Thursday and Saturday.

The improving weather forecast for Sunday - morning clouds and afternoon sun - could cause a surge in attendance.

Staff multimedia producer Joe Barrentine spent some time Saturday learning about how sailing ships engage in battle. Check out his video here.

Apparently the folks on the HMS Bounty liked our poster of the ship sailing in front of Stadium High School.

It's taped to a cabinet below deck: