Westward, the Sea Education Association's 240-ton topsail schooner, slices into a sunlit sea, far from the Arctic waters she also sails. "We think our graduates gain an understanding of the sea which they could not get in any other way," says the vessel's master, Jonathan Lucas. By the end of a term at sea, the students are running the ship, "not by resisting and overcoming the sea, but by respecting it and using its forces to advantage." Photograph: T.E. Heidenreich.
"The More Yards the Better!"
Two Annual Meetings Important news was reported at the international meeting of the Sail Training Association held in England in November. The 1978 Tall Ship Races, it was announced, will go to Goteborg in Sweden, to Fair Isle, and Oslo, Norway. The 1980 races will go to Friedrichshaven, Germany, and Karlskrona, Denmark. It is hoped that Soviet authorities will invite the Tall Ships on to Tallin, Estonia. The very good news was given out that the Norwegian government is providing financial aid to permit the Sorlandet and Stratsraad Lehmkuhl to sail again in the 1977 season. Laid up in 1976 for lack of funds, these vessels could not take part in Operation Sail, though the Norwegian Christian Radich did. The American Sail Training Association was formally enrolled as a constituent member of the international organization, and will take a seat on its governing council, whose chairman is Commander the Hon. Greville Howard, RN (ret.). The Annual Meeting of the AST A, held December 3 in Newport, Rhode Island, saw the following officers elected: Chairman, Rear Admiral Joseph Wylie, USN (ret.); Vice Chairman, Dr. Robin Wallace; Secretary, Captain Eugene C. Kenyon, USN (ret.). John G. Winslow,
president of the Seamen's Church Institute in New York, was named Finance Chairman, Patrick G. Kirby of Newport was named Membership Chairman, and Francis E . Bowker of Mystic Seaport, Connecticut, was named Chairman of Sail Training & Education. New regional directors were elected: Henry Dormitzer, president of the Historical Museum of Massachusetts, and Captain Edward Cassidy, USCG (ret.), of the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, for Massachusetts; Robert Hubner and H. Alexander Salm, both directors of Operation Sail-1976, for New York; Richard K. Page, director of the Philadelphia Maritime Museum, for Philadelphia; Robert E. Michel, businessman and yachtsman and prime mover in Op Sail Baltimore, for Baltimore; John R. Sears, Jr., realtor active in sail training, for Norfolk. Dues were increased to $20 in view of expanding responsibilities, and by laws were amended to permit the Association to accept affiliated organizations as members, and to provide standards of accreditation leading to the establishment of squadrons on a regional basis. Affairs concluded with a testimonial dinner to Elwood E. Leonard, Chairman of the National Advisory Council, whose devoted service to the educational purposes of sail training elicited well earned plaudits from all hands.
The debate over the merits of square rig and fore-and-aft for deepwater work carries over from the late nineteenth century, when the first big multimast schooners were built, into our day. (See Klebingat letter, SH No. 5.) And it is visible in the diverse rigs of sail training ships built for the purpose. Spain's Juan Sebastian de Elcano and Chile's Esmeralda must be among the biggest topsail schooners ever built-fore-and-aft rigged four-masters, with square yards on foretopmast only. But when the Libertad was laid down to the same basic design in the Arsenal Naval in Buenos Aires, Captain Juan P. Jose DeValle, then Commandant, argued successfully for her conversion to the full-rigged ship she is today. The big-ship design most widely followed in new construction in the decade prior to World War II and since is that of the German bark Eagle-squarerigged on fore and main, fore-and-aft mizzen. This design was most lately embodied in Columbia's Gloria, built in 1968. Two years earlier the Sail Training Associated built their famous Sir Winston Churchill as a three-masted topsail schooner, a little over half Eagle's length. But the highly successful Loyalist class in Canada use square rig on a much smaller hull, less than half the Churchill's length. These 60-foot steel vessels are brigantines or half brigs: square rigged on the foremast, fore-and-aft on the main. The Soviets are the nation most thoroughly committed to sail training in big ships. The new ships they are building are reputed to be generally similar to the Tovaritsch (ex-Gorch Fack) of the Eagle class; but during Operation Sail one Soviet captain was heard to opine that the new vessels should be full-rigged ships, not barks. "The more yards the better, for this kind of work!'' he said. 29