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." 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!