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En route to the festival, on an absolutely perfect June day.
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I've always had a soft spot for this boat, s/v Adventurer, that belongs to our dock-neighbor Duncan. As the world was just starting to open up after Covid, he had agreed to show his boat at a festival in Annapolis and asked us if we'd like to assist. (Of course!)
It was a fairly small festival, by the standards we'd come to expect after years of touring with El Galeon and Nao Santa Maria, but it was pretty darn fun, and local so very easy. Best of all, after a day of chatting with visitors and explaining various things about the boat, I was convinced that I still had my tourguide mojo and Covid hadn't caused it to atrophy. Which was useful because it gave us the confidence to say an enthusiastic "yes" when the Fundacion reached out by email in the autumn of 2023 to ask if we'd be willing to work on the Nao Trinidad for a few weeks, and that in turn led to our amazing opportunity on El Galeon in Europe for summer 2024. Talk about putting yourself in luck's way!
So when Duncan caught us on the dock one spring morning and asked if we'd again be interested in representing his boat again this year, this time for several days and including a pleasant sail to St Michaels and back, we were most definitely willing.
It was three fun days as part of a classic-boat festival in a popular small town (amusingly, the very same one where we started with the Nao Trinidad as our first reentry into the tall ship world after Covid). Of course, since we were working we didn't see a lot of the festival, but we saw enough, and made some great memories. Here's a little captioned photo tour.
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| From the boat's promotional literature. I had to memorize all the boat specs and details; and felt a little awkward having to ask our friend how much the boat cost and how much he'd spent on the refit. Because we knew people are curious and they'd ask (they did!) but it certainly felt intrusive in a way that quoting those numbers for El Galeon did not. This boat was someone's personal boat, not owned by an institution. |
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| Crew lanyards always get you awesome VIP treatment at boat shows. (I'd forgotten just how much, but quickly grew to appreciate it.) The way this one was laid out, though, could have been a business card with an extremely cool job title! |
Many of the boats were "deck tours only." But so much of Adventurer's detail was below, and well worth showing off.
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| The main salon was gorgeous. The tabletop has a custom wood decorative inlay, and is on a mechanized pedestal. It can be countertop height, dining height, fold out, or slide over and make out as a support to become part of a double bed, that we slept on after the festival closed every night. |
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| The galley was bigger and nicer than the kitchen in my first apartment! |
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| On the opposite side, pull-out fridge and freezer drawers. Scary how many visitors thought these were pizza ovens! |
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| Many boats have teak-and-holly flooring with decorative light and dark stripes. On this boat, though, it's the real deal, in the traditional way. Each strip of wood is individually laid, and the light strips are a couple of millimeters thicker than the dark ones, making the surface nonskid. |
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| We did get a few hours to wander the festival; here's one of the classics, immaculately restored in true 1950s style (not the fuzzy dice!) except it was converted from gasoline to lithium battery. |
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| The on site museum had a nice little exhibit about the Underground Railroad that ran through Maryland. |
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| Another vintage classic, this one using airplane construction techniques. |
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| Crew passes get you VIP treatment and entre to many parts of the festivals, but it was these novel crew t-shirts that started lots of conversations for us! |
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| On the first full afternoon, we were supposed to do 1-hour boat rides. Now, an hour is fine for a small powerboat to zip around the harbour with guests, but it's quite a different experience on a large sailboat. Basically we left the dock, raised the sails, sailed for 10 minutes, turned around, sailed another 10 minutes, lowered the sails, and returned to the dock; then did it again! Very thankful for electric winches on this schedule. Every one of the guests who wanted to had a (brief) chance at the helm. For those who didn't have smartphones with them, I took pictures and emailed to them. I had lots of pictures of strangers on my phone by the end of the event. |
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| Not quite sure what to make of this quirky vessel that was also (apparently) offering boat rides that afternoon. |
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| At dusk on the last day of the festival, we witnessed a surprise wedding proposal. A few young people were loitering on the lawn directly across from where we were docked as the crowds left for the night. I thought it odd but not particularly concerning until the woman screamed. Tired as we were, we invited them aboard, we had no champagne but we toasted their engagement with box wine in plastic cups, and the friend of the soon-to-be-groom who had photoed the proposal, took engagement pictures of them all over Adventurer. |
The trip back to Annapolis was less glorious than the trip out, gray and misty and motor rather than sail. It was still pleasant being out on a boat after a weekend like that. And it was going to be our last weekend before the real work began. We had to kick it into gear though; we had only two weeks left to pack for 3 months on El Galeon in Europe, get Cinderella safely put to bed for the summer and our apartment ready for someone else to live there while we were gone.
