I had the chance to go fishing with Todd Reis from the Cascade Musky Association. It was a long cold day with lots of laughs, but not too many fish. That's fishing!

Tall Ships Queen Kathleen Merryman received this fun e-mail today from Tacoma resident Michael McSweeney.

My father was the Oscar nominated film editor of Mutiny on the Bounty back in the early 60’s.

We were overjoyed when we found out that the ship, H.M.S. Bounty, was coming for the Tall Ships Festival.

The ship, and the movie, meant a great deal to my father, who died in 1999. He spent eleven months in Tahiti shooting the picture back in 1961 and we grew up hearing tales of Marlon Brando’s and Richard Harris’ antics on and off the set.

We boarded the Bounty early Sunday morning and decided it would be fun to recreate an old MGM publicity photo taken on the Bounty in 1961 of my dad with the director.

Here is a picture of my son, Patrick, and I on the ship taken on July 6, 2008.

Below is the MGM Studios publicity shot of director Lewis Milestone and my dad, Jack McSweeney, sitting on the exact spot on the ship in Tahiti in 1961.

We even got Adam, a Bounty crew member, to play along.

U.S.C.G. Barque Eagle Bos'n Keith Raisch had planned to work up more Bosn't School of Eagle Deck Speak lessons during Tall Ships. But we kept missing connections, and did not get it done.

Today we got this message from him to all of you.

Kits:

First, sorry I didn't get back in time to give the last blog, but you
know how it goes...

"For seven days do all you're able, and on the eighth holystone the deck
and scrape the cable." I was off checking on "Port Townsend Foundry" as
they are currently making some new blocks for us.

The event was vastly enjoyable, I met several old shipmates and made
many friends along the way, after all we're all sailors at heart.

To share a "closing" view, I think it best expressed by "Alan Villiers"
My pardon for the gender based time he wrote it, I've found women hold
all the same feelings.

"She is more than a ship to the sailor in her focs'l; she is a
personality. He knows her; he has watched her make her voyage, has seen
her come bravely through a hurricane, haul safely off a lee shore, work
miraculously through a calm. He has studied her little ways, the
eccentricities and peculiarities which each sailing ship has to herself;
he knows what she can do and what she can't; he knows when she is being
asked to do too much and when too little. He always speaks of his ship
as if she lived."

OR probably more appropriate for this time (same author being quoted)

"Should the passing of the deep-sea sailing ship be lamented? Look at a
picture of one, and think. It is regrettable to see anything that is
beautiful disappear. The sailer is not beautiful merely because she is
old; the sea holds no grander sight than the ship-of-sails seen so
rarely. Whether she is rolling in a doldrum calm, snoring through the
water by the wind with every stitch spread to bear her on, or driving
under shortened sail before the storm, she is a sight to stir the blood
of all who see her[...] There is another reason for the regretting the
going of the sailing ship, and that is because the sailer takes with her
the natural training-ground for the sea. I believe there is no sailor
with a better knowledge of his craft and better training for it than the
man who has been brought up in square rigged sail. It brings out the
best -- and the worst -- that the boy has in him; it teaches him
initiative and not to be afraid to use it.... It does a boy good, too,
to have his character shown in the light of day and the rough edges
knocked off..."

I believe EAGLE, and all sail training does this for boy and girl alike.

Thanks to the city of Tacoma, all the volunteers, performers, and others
and the other ships for making our first visit a memorable one.

Respectfully

Bosn

He may have left Tacoma and made it out to sea, but USCG Barque Eagle Bos’n Keith Raisch wants your brain cells to remain sharp.
He has a pop quiz for you:

Q: “What is it that is maritime in nature, that every person of driving age deals with daily?”

A: “Traffic lights. The lights that are used at sea are red to port, green to starboard. White was pretty much on the stern, or dead ahead, when power came on,” he said.

“The English Channel was the busiest waterway in the world,” he explained.

“Sailing ships at night had to figure out a way at night of determining who got to go. It started out with a white light to let you know I was there, then evolved to the red and green on the two sides. At the same time on land, we were riding horses across countrysides and open fields and did not need traffic patterns. When the technology caught on ashore, the sailors brought their rules ashore. Now you have traffic lights, in red, green and amber.”

Thanks, Prof. Bos’n!

Two U.S.C.G. Barque Eagle cadets manned the gangway on America’s Tall Ship’s last day in Tacoma. Travis Christy, 20, of Valdosta, Ga., and Blake Morris, 19, of Durango., Colo., thanked people for coming to see the ship, but regretted they could no longer let anyone aboard.
Eagle was bound for the open sea.
Cadets had formed a hand-me-down line earlier in the day to load enough stores to last 200 people for 15 days. There had been talk for days that, instead of heading south for San Francisco, she would sail north and play in the waters off the Alaskan coast.
Eagle has the time to do it. The sail to San Francisco takes less than a week. The decision lay with Capt. Christopher Sinnett.
At 12:45 p.m., Sinnett mustered the ship’s company to the waist of the ship. He introduced and welcomed new shipmates. He noted that a week and 15 minutes earlier, Eagle had sprinted out of Victoria toward Port Angeles. He encouraged cadets to consider all they had done in that week. They had raced under sail across open water. They had spent a day of intensive cross training at the Seattle Coast Guard Station. They had spent time ashore in Tacoma’s big festival. Some of them had visited Mount Rainier.
Now, he said, it was time again to focus on their mission aboard Eagle.
And then the wind changed.
Those of us straining to hear him from the shore lost the connection. I heard him say “Alaska,” “circulating” and “rumors.” That’s all. Cadets Christy and Morris had duties elsewhere while Sinnett was speaking, but they had heard indirectly that Alaska was not in the plan for Eagle.
Behind Eagle, the Tall Ships fun kept sailing on. Lynx, Lady Washington and Amazing Grace powered into Commencement Bay for a battle sail.
Beside Eagle, the tug Henry Foss and the U.S. Army reserve tug Scholaire got into position to help turn her around.
In the gathering crowd stood Tall ships volunteer Heinz Stettinius. He was a child in Germany during World War II. He was about eight when his uncle, a ship’s captain in the navy, invited him aboard the Gorch Fock, a sister ship to the Horst Wessel. After the war, the Soviet Union claimed Gorch Fock as a war prize and named her Tovarishch. The United States took Horst Wessel and named her Eagle.
As was so often the case with festival volunteers, Stettinius was working so much he could not make time to board Eagle. So he came to bid her farewell.
On deck, cadets wriggled into the harnesses they wear when they scamper up the rigging and out on the yardarms.
One of them walked out onto the bowsprit and sat by the union jack, a blue ensign with white stars.
Belowdecks, Chief Engineering Officer Karyn Terry brought the 1000-horsepower Caterpillar D399 diesel engine to life. Cadets hauled in the mooring lines. The ship’s whistle blew one long blast and three short ones. A baby on shore wailed in reply.
Eagle moved.
The cadet lowered the union jack.
The shore crowd cheered and waved hats.
Cadets climbed the ratlines and stood at attention in mid-air to salute the crowd.
In Thea’s Park, one voice led a cheer echoed three times by the crowd: “Hip hip hurrah!”
On the stage, Tom Lewis sang “Haul away your foresheets. ‘Tis our sailing time. Haul away down channel. ‘Tis our sailing time... Fair winds, Eagle! Fair winds!”
And then she was away.

Tacoma is just the second major port of the season for most of these ships. Next stop for much of the fleet is Port Alberni, B.C. for its Festival of Sails, Friday and Saturday. Featured ships include the HMS Bounty, Nina, Lynx, Oriole, Lady Washington and Hawaiian Chieftain.

The ASTA Pacific Coast Tall Ships Challenge race continues this summer with stops at the Festival of Sail San Francisco on July 23-27, the Tall Ships Festival in Oxnard on Aug. 7-10, the Festival of Sail Los Angeles on Aug. 13-17 and finally to San Diego for its Tall Ships festival Aug. 20-24.

The Eagle is not attending the Port Alberni event, but will be at the California stops.

The American Sail Training Association alternates its annual race between the two coasts and the Great Lakes region. It won't be back in the Pacific until 2011.

The crew of the HMCA Oriole has a different mission during Tall Ships Tacoma 2008.

“We’re part of the Canadian Navy,” Master Seaman Don Read explained, “so we’re here for public relations. We don’t do the sailings because we’re funded by the government. So we can spend as much time as possible with people who want to board.”

The 102-foot marconi-rigged ketch played host to thousands of visitors and a host of events, Read said. About 1,850 people boarded the ship on Sunday, and about 1,500 toured it Saturday.

And the response from the community has been overwhelming, Read said.

“We were told from Day 1 that the city wants to make this the best shop on the Tall Ships circuit,” he said, “and we’ve had so much support here from volunteers taking our laundry in the morning and returning it in the evening. Anything we needed we had in an hour. Transportation was provided; they went everywhere and anywhere we wanted to go.”

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.
.

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.

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.

Peter Haley/The News Tribune

In case you've missed some of the links to all the great multimedia available online for Tall Ships Tacoma, here's a list of the galleries, video, audio slideshows and 360-degree QTVRs we've put together so far.

• Gallery: Tall Ships Tacoma Parade of Sail

• Gallery: Setting sail with the tall ships

• Video: Learn about cannon battling on tall ships

• Gallery: Photos from the Tall Ships festival

• Gallery: Tall ships muster in Quartermaster Harbor

• Slideshow: It's a pirate's life

• Gallery: Aboard the USCG Eagle

• Gallery: Tall ships in Victoria, BC.

• 360 VR: Meet the Lady Washington

• 360 VR: Meet the Bounty

• 360 VR: Meet the Eagle

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