Bremerhaven, Germany (Part 1 of 3)

The very first thing I had to do on arrival in Germany -- a giant beer and a pretzel!

  When we were kids, WWII was in the rather recent past and Germany was definitely one of the bad guys. We'd heard and read a lot about how the country reconciled that history and were curious to learn for ourselves; this would be our first visit. One of our young shipmates last year was German; he said he was proud of the country he grew up in for rejecting its past, and for the steps they'd taken to make sure it wouldn't happen again. He told me that Nazi symbols are banned and the Holocaust is taught in schools. I compared that to the US, and how Confederate flags still fly in parts of the South. We still haven't  explicitly rejected that, and cry "free speech!" But there have always been limits on free speech in service to public safety; yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is the textbook example. Germany apparently classifies echoes of the racist history in the same category of danger. (Recently, Wales has made it a crime for politicians to lie, and 6 other EU countries are considering the same. Again, balancing free speech with public safety limits.)

We saw several examples of this new philosophy as we walked in town. Ironically the first time I saw one, I didn't recognize it for what it was. I thought that the seating part of this park bench on the promenade near where our ship was docked was truncated in the kind of social engineering we'd do here to discourage the homeless from sleeping on the bench. Then I used my trusty Google Translate that has made my traveling life so much better. Nope. It's public art with a message: the back above the truncated seat reads “no place for racism” in German.

"No place for racism." The rest are welcome to sit on this comfortable bench with a view of the water.

Before our German guest left, he gave us a few suggestions for where to eat and sightsee in town. He strongly recommended two museums within easy walking distance of where our ship was docked. We managed both of them, and I'll cover each in a separate post. 

A "goodbye" photo with the German crew trainee.

The ship's hull and sails are Heineken green! 

One of several canals the tall ships were docked in. We look so tiny here in this photo taken from the roof of a nearby building; docked between tall ships from other countries. The one directly ahead of us is the Uruguayan (?) navy training ship; like our Coast Guard Eagle. It has a crew of 230, to our 21. Across from us is Germany’s. At 08:00 we hear dueling national anthems from several countries. Comment from a friend when I originally posted this on my Instagram :"...we hear dueling national anthems..." 😁 add it to the list of “weird sentences I never expected to type.” (Can't find us? We're the dark shape near the middle of the photo, almost directly above the copper cone-shaped chimney cap in the middle ground. )

City's logo on a manhole cover. 

Street view on the pedestrian plaza in the downtown area.

I'm not sure what this sculpture was about. But it was clearly designed with a break in the row of "people" so visitors could interact with it. I found it amusing that, by chance, the clothing I was wearing that day coordinated with the color scheme perfectly!

We were attendees at a tall ship festival, after all, so we took the opportunity to ... tour some of the other ships at the festival and talk with their crews. Crew-to-crew conversations are very different from those we have with visitors to our own ship. Visitors ask how big our ship is and how many crew, and where do we sleep (many seem to think we each have private staterooms like on a cruise ship and are stunned when I tell them we sleep in a dorm with 14 of our shipmates) and how did we get this job and what was our training. With other crew we want to know how's your watch schedule, do you have a dedicated cook or just take it in turns, how's the helm, and other minutia of daily life aboard. The festivals often also include crew parties after hours (with a little bit of beer, arm-wrestling competitions among people who haul on heavy lines and raise sails for their daily activities, can be intense!) fireworks, and parades. We'll sometimes get a peek behind the scenes into non-public areas, as well. Here, a montage of ship details and stuff-the-public-doesn't-see. The irony is that the public parts of these ships is much more crowded than my photos indicate; I usually waited for quiet moments for pictures. 

The Peruvian ship offered displays of cultural heritage and foods as part of the tours

One of the crew members of the Omani ship had lived in Tampa as a child, so his English was excellent and we exchanged some stories. He invited us for tea!

Another part of the Omani ship. I was impressed by the subtle detailing -- the arches on these louvered doors to me have crown shapes evoking Middle Eastern architecture.

check out the rope work on this ship's bell, intricate work carefully done in the national colours of Oman

Group photo of the crews from all the ships in the festival at the end of the crew parade. The Galeon delegation is in the middle of the photo, in navy blue polos.

View back to our ship, from the deck of the ship docked ahead of us.

Goodnight, Bremerhaven! (Nightly fireworks and light show, as seen from our quarterdeck.)

Passage: Dover, UK to Bremerhaven, DE

 After weeks of solo appearances as the only visiting attraction in the towns along the English coast, our next two stops were going to be something completely different. We'd be one of 50 or more tall ships from all over the world participating in two massive festivals. We were preparing for long days and huge crowds, and also for the delightful chance to exchange notes with crews from other ships. First, though, I was looking forward to the peace of an ocean passage where the predicted weather was benign. All too soon would come the nonstop social time. 

I try not to sound ungrateful, and remember the advice of one of my favourite captains who had the soul of a poet as well as being a competent mariner: "Your everyday life, is someone else's once in a lifetime." Though he was speaking in reference to our "trainees" -- guests who pay to sail a single passage with us as we teach them the rudiments of being tall ship crew -- it really is applicable more broadly. I try to drink in all the details, savor every moment of this crazy adventure. I have a few memories of this particular passage, my birthday, and a particularly good set of running jokes with two of our guests.

10 August 2025: "Bye, Dover, thanx for the memories. See you in a few days in Bremerhaven."

11 August: Screenshot of my maps app. Trip report so far: sea state flat, winds < 10 knots. We’re a little way west of Amsterdam no land in sight, lots of wind farms. Today’s most likely peril is sunburn. Not bad for mid-August.

I don't make a public to-do about my birthday even on milestone years. Not because I'm vain about my age, or shy (yeah, hardly that!), but just ... it feels like I haven’t done anything worthy of a special celebration, just continued to exist. I'd throw a big party if I had actually done something, say, completed a major project, published a book, hit a major career milestone, etc. As for birthdays, if anything I thought my parents were owed the celebration, not me. Or my friends and family, for putting up with me another year. So neither Dan nor I said anything, but my passport info was (obviously) on the crew list and my shipmates felt differently. Surprise cake and balloons appeared. I learned that the "Happy Birthday" song works in either English or Spanish, as "cumpleanos feliz" and "happy birthday to you" have the same number of syllables! This happened right at change-of-watch, and I hadn’t guessed. 

Mother Nature cooperated with the mild weather that day, though we got rain later.

We waited outside the harbour for the rest of the fleet to assemble, then kicked off the festival with a boat parade. Here's just a few pix, there were many more vessels of all flags, ages, and sizes.

Early in the procession

We often offer visitors the opportunity to sail with us. They basically live as "trainee crew members" where they are assigned a bunk in the dorm, learn to stand a watch, climb the rigging, steer the ship, and generally get a taste of our extraordinary ordinary lives at sea. This group were particularly lucky to participate in the parade as well!

This passage will also be forever in my memory with lots of laughs. We had two trainee/guests who I spent a lot of time chatting with, one from England and one from Germany.  Just before we crossed the sea boundary from Netherlands to Germany I gave the helm to our German guest (the one at the far right in the photo above) and instructed him on the basics of steering the ship. I told him that when he got back to work he could tell his colleagues “I took the helm of a Spanish Galeon and brought the ship into German waters,” and it would be technically true. One of the guests then told me that there is a game they play where you have to tell a short paragraph or long sentence and it’s all true except for one detail and the audience has to find the one small thing that is untrue. So of course this statement would fit right in. We started to elaborate and embellish  the sentence/paragraph as we had the German man taking the Spanish ship into German waters with a crew of 25 French Spanish and Argentinian people and two Americans. (The false part was the French crew, we had all the others.)  Continuing to polish our technically true statement made for many laughs for the rest of the three day sail. 

I told them that in the US we had a game along the same vein, two truths and a lie. It's a pretty funny getting-to-know-you game; as the name implies you make 3 statements about yourself and the others have to guess which one isn’t true. I told him that I often use, "I took the helm of a Spanish galleon and on the captain's order, headed out to sea," as one of my unlikely truths, and now he had a similar one. I also told him of one of my greatest living history educational triumphs. We did a maritime history presentation at a school in our pirate garb. The kids made their own sextants out of cardboard and straws, measured the sun angle and calculated the latitude of the school; learned about real pirates in history and what life aboard would have been like in the 1600s. We had them come to school dressed as pirates that day, and along with the serious lessons there were sword fights and beads and treasure chests. It was a small town and we had traveled and would be staying overnight, so went out to dinner with the kids and their parents afterwards. At that dinner we offered one last lesson: I outrageously filled my dinner tray with 4 different kinds of desserts, and no real food. I told the kids that, as we had discussed, few pirates lived to old age, being bad guys and all that. So I might as well be gluttonous and eat dessert first. But since the kids were all expecting to live long and prosperous lives, they needed to take care of their bodies with healthy foods and moderate treats. One bad meal wouldn’t kill me, but it certainly made for a memorable evening for a bunch of 8 year olds! Five years later a parent overheard her child playing two truths and a lie, and one of the child's truths was, “I ate dinner with pirates at a Chinese restaurant.” (Remember, this was a young kid, so five years was probably nearly half her lifetime!)

I took the photo partly for our friends who have emigrated to Portugal, and partly because I hadn't seen this sail configuration before, especially on a vessel of this time period.

While it was a generally benign passage, the weather didn't always cooperate.

This is the Nao Victoria, a replica of the only one of Magellan's ships to complete the first circumnavigation of the world. This wooden replica was first built by the foundation that also build El Galeon. Like the ship it represents, the replica also sailed around the world!

A few more moments from the boat parade:

Old wind power side by side with a modern wind farm. 

The tall ships sometimes display their crew standing on the yards coming in to harbour during these parades. But in our case, Josemi and Laura didn’t just stand on the yards, they **danced a flamenco!**

Sadly, the organization putting this massive festival together wasn’t all that well-organized; we broke two cleats being towed by a too-powerful-for-our-size tug while coming into harbour when the opening bridge had to close unexpectedly for the fire brigade to pass. (No people were hurt, just wood and metal, already mostly repaired.) 

Harbormaster wouldn’t let us fire the cannons so we used our (weird sounding and quite loud) manual wind-up horn.

Dover -- Dover Castle (Part 2 of 2)

 

I promise our day off tours were about more than just "Castles and Cathedrals" in every port as so many European towns revolved around these two. We were encouraged to make an exception for Dover Castle because it had so many layers of history, and, we were told, was more reconstructed and furnished inside so we'd get a better idea of how people lived. It was a steep hike from the port to get to the headland above the town; we left extra time so we wouldn't be tired before we even got there!

The tower that guards the entry to the grounds.

(Reconstructed) drawbridge.

Here's a bit of the historic layering I mentioned. The somewhat lumpy structure on the right is a Roman pharos, or lighthouse. The building next to it is much newer, a Saxon church "only" about 1000 years old. Elsewhere on the castle grounds are brick buildings built as officers' barracks about 200 years ago, that were used right up into WWII.

Following are a set of photos of various parts of the main castle. The contrast between the elaborate living areas of the nobility and the plain wooden structures for the working classes was quite dramatic. The paint colours were interesting, and, we were told, accurate. Remember that back in the day they couldn't just have any colour they wanted; the dyes had to come from plants or minerals in the natural world. Although the blue and green looked somewhat flat, in historic times they would have some sparkle. The blue -- royal blue -- was actually made of crushed lapis lazuli stone from Afghanistan. The semiprecious mineral would have flecks of pyrite in it, so when crushed it would have had a glittery shine. Ditto the green, that would have come from malachite.

drawbridge mechanism

We had to do the tourist thing in the throne room. 

Lots of secret passageways

It's easy to visualize the castle overlooking and protecting the harbour and the town below

an elegant bedchamber

A more humble room, storage, and jugs and bowls

part of the kitchens below

part of the main hall

where the nobility could sleep and relax. Note again the red, blue, and green paint.

Kitchens

Even more kitchens and food and beer storage.

Beer brewing medieval style

Another section of the castle grounds

And an older section of the grounds

A chunk of lapis (from Wikipedia article linked above). I inherited a necklace of lapis beads from my mother and they're beautiful; can't really imagine crushing these sparkly stones to powder.