CREW STORY · 30 April 2013 · BY Dmitry Badiarov
It Is Not for Everybody
People often imagine tall ships as romantic. They are. Right until somebody asks you to climb onto a yard carrying a sail that weighs hundreds of kilograms.
| DatesFrom / To | VesselClass, size, tonnage | VoyagePorts visited, capacity in which sailing | Days on board | Distance logged | Night hours | Wind |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 29 Apr 2013 – 30 Apr 2013 | Tall Ship Shtandart | Enkhuizen - Lelystad; crew | 2 | 15.4 NM | — | — |
From the member's personal logbook.
The call obviously did not deter us from climbing up, or from sailing her ever again. It did, however, help quite a few first-time visitors discover that perhaps the sea simply wasn't their thing. I was told that the mainsail of the mainmast weighs around four hundred kilograms when dry, and perhaps twice as much after hours of rain. I never verified those numbers, but I never had any reason to doubt them either. Heck, it was heavy.
Packing that sail high above the deck normally requires eight people standing together on the yard. From up there you sometimes notice a few people below lying on deck as though they were on a beach, looking up at you with expressions of genuine bewilderment. "Why?" "When you could simply lie in the sun..."
Later that day, en route from Enkhuizen to Lelystad, we visited Batavia, the Dutch replica of the seventeenth-century ship. You might even recognise both Batavia and Shtandart from the 2015 film Michiel de Ruyter. This was only my third voyage aboard Shtandart. By then I had begun noticing something curious. The ship had a habit of making ordinary people discover they were capable of rather more than they had imagined.