A Day Late . . . But Not Really

Last weekend was Tall Ships Festival.  We love watching the Parade of Sail that always starts the tall ships festival, but we don’t like big crowds of people.  In the past our strategy has been to find a piece of not-so-well known beach a bit away from the crowd down by the lift bridge to watch the boats sail on the water.  However, this year we ended up at a beach that was too far away, and the route the boats took outside the bridge changed, so we could hardly see the boats even through the binoculars.

We weren’t terribly upset though, because it was a hot day, and the kidlets were having a wonderful time swimming at the beach, and that alone made the afternoon excursion worthwhile.

Although we really would have liked to see the ships up close, I was well aware of the fact that 300,000 people, most of them from out of the area, were expected to descend on the area that they were docked at, and I wisely decided to just stay away.  With that many people, I reasoned that it would be hard to see anything up close, and I really dislike large crowds of people.  I kind of felt bad for not letting the kids check them out closer, but it just would have been too hard.

However, on the last night of the festival, I saw in the news that one of the ships would be staying a few extra days to let people on for tours.  It was actually the ship, a galleon from Spain, that I was most interested in seeing because it had not ever been here before.  I knew many people here for the weekend had left already, so I suspected the crowd wouldn’t be as large.   I talked with my kidlets about being patient in what could be a crowd of people still, and they were very excited to go down and see the big ship that was staying.

When we got down to the docking area, almost all of the tall ships were still there, getting ready to depart.  Yay for us!  There were hardly any spectators at all and we got to get up close!  The line to board the El Galeon was just slowly starting to form, and we were able to be one of the first people to take a look around for the day.  It was totally worth it, even though we had to stand in line next to some grumpy, snipey adults, because the kidlets just ate up all the information about the boat.

We learned SO much about galleons.  The Mayflower was a type of galleon, and these kinds of ships were the main link between the empires of Europe and their colonies.  They sometimes also served as warships. It was fascinating to see how the spaces in the ship interacted and what people did in each space, in addition to tall the amazing sails, masts, and rigging that is just mind boggling.  The ship is a floating museum.

These interior pictures below are a special room next to the balcony on the back of the boat where important dignitaries met together and made important decisions.  The rooms were fitted with furniture that was original to the time period.  Not just anyone ended up in this part of the ship.  It was reserved for only the very important, and it’s just a teensy part of the ship.  Most of the parts were enormously crowded, and its crazy to think of the lack of space per person on one of these ships, along with the rancid supplies they were consuming and the peril of that kind of journey across the ocean. 

One thing that surprised me about the galleon was the location of the ship’s wheel.  It didn’t even seem like you would be able to see where you were going from where you were steering!

We totally lucked out Monday morning, because right after we got off the galleon, all the other tall ships were exiting the harbor through the ship canal, so we got to see them leaving up close and personal.  Although there were a few people watching, really, the crowd was not big at all.  It was fantastic.  We watched them travel down the canal and open their sails to the breeze when they got to open water, and then head out on the lake.