OK, last time I promised some pictures from our meeting with the Denmark so here we go:
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| On first glance one might say the Denmark looks a lot like the Picton Castle but if you look at the last mast you will see there are yards on that mast, for square sails. Picton Castle does not have yards on her mizzen mast. Denmark is a Ship Rigged ship and Picton Castle is a Bark, the difference being the square sails on the mizzen. This photo was taken at Carriacou. |
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| Here is the Picton Castle for comparison. We have our spanker set to help keep us pointed into the wind while we're at anchor. Note the lack of yards on the last (mizzen) mast. This photo was taken at Antigua. |
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| Another difference between the 2 ships is that the Denmark runs her generators 24 hours a day, while we run ours twice a day, for a few hours each time, to charge our batteries. Since they always run their generator they light their ship up at night, which I thought was very pretty. We just have an anchor light on the bow and a stern light. |
The Denmark sailors toured Picton Castle and we all toured the Denmark. She is a more modern ship and on the Denmark the trainees all sleep in hammocks, so they all fit in a smaller space. That leaves room for a few luxuries that we don't have, like a laundry and 8 heads (bathrooms). We have 3. Our visit was a very brief one though because we had to get to Aruba for the Sail Aruba festival so we only spent 2 days and then both ships departed Carriacou together. It has probably been well over 100 years since 2 square rigged ships were in the harbor at Carriacou at the same time, so it was pretty cool to be a part of it.
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| Here she is getting under weigh. We set all our sails before they had these set but, because she's bigger than us, she was still faster and kind of ran away from us. We had planned to sail along side and give them a big cheer but we couldn't get close enough. It was really nice getting to see her under sail though. I've been to many tall ship festivals and have always loved them but one rarely gets to see them while they're sailing. |
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| Denmark sailed to Aruba, which is South and we headed to Bonaire, which was west so we had to part company pretty quickly. The main point of meeting up with them was for the captain to try and entice some of the Denmark sailors to sail on Picton Castle in the future, and it probably worked. I talked to a few who thought it was pretty awesome that we sailed around the world. Most voyages on the Denmark are only 4 months and cross the Atlantic and then head back home. |
I'm in Aruba now on my only day off while we're here. We spent the last 3 days being the flagship of the Sail Aruba maritime festival. Interestingly, we were the only sailing ship, all the others were military ships. We hosted the captains from all of the other ships and the King and Queen of the Netherlands on the Picton Castle after we were in a parade of ships. A group of us, including me, danced the Hakka for the our guests. Saturday we were in a crew parade, with groups from all of the military ships. We all wore sarongs and gave ourselves facial tattoos and danced the Hakka during the parade...it was quite fun but extremely HOT! Because of all the important guest coming aboard, we've been working extra hard on ship maintenance and beautification so there hasn't been much time off, really since we got to the Caribbean. Now it looks like this may very well be our last stop of the voyage. We depart tomorrow for Lunenburg, 2,000 miles away. We're scheduled to stop, briefly, in Bermuda but it seems unlikely that there will be enough time. The ship is scheduled to be at some tall ship festivals in the Northeast so we kind of have a deadline when we have to be back. I'm way behind on blog posts so, if you're interested, please check back, even after the voyage is over and I will try to fill in some of the blanks after I get back on land.
