The Russian Giants...

Away all boarding parties!
Having visited the Mexican bark Cuauhtemoc, let us move on to the two Russian giants--the 4-masted barks Kruzenshtern and Sedov (the two black-hulled vessels).

Kruzenshtern was the largest vessel to participate in the Baltic Tall Ships Race 2007 and came in a full two days before the Sedov and so was naturally first on my itinerary.

She is a true giant among sailing vessels, measuring in at over 114 meters long (376ft) and towering 51 meters (168ft) to the mastheads--taller than the high cliffs on Stockholm Harbor's southern shore. All together, this behemoth is rated at some 4,700 tons.


Originally, she sailed under a German flag as the Padua, having been built in Bremerhaven in 1926. She had been a record-setter back then, making a run from Hamburg to South-Australia in just 67 days. Then WW II came along and upset the whole apple barrel. When the dust cleared, the Padua was handed over to the Soviet Union as a war reparation and renamed the Kruzenshtern in honor of the the famous Russian explorer.

Now this stunning forest of spars and rigging is one of the most famous tall ships in the world, traveling to all oceans as an emissary of 'Mother Russia'.

And what an impressive emissary she is! She dwarfed all the other ships in the harbor, towered over the big shipping warehouses, and even peered over the top of downtown Stockholm's highest hill! She even rivalled the church steeples for height and grandeur.

But there is no better way to make yourself feel small than to actually go aboard such a hu-norm-ungous craft....

But once on deck, I found Kruzenshtern wasn't so bad. In fact, she appears to be a remarkably comfortable vessel--not in a beanbag chair kind of way, but rather more in that as huge and daunting as she seems from the pier, she is so narrow that she feels like a much more sanely-sized vessel when you are onboard. On deck, she gives you a feeling of 'sure, I could probably sail this thing out of the harbor all right'.

True, she is big, but not that big. Kruzenshtern is still just a square-rigged sailing ship with all the familiar elements--bollards, lines, pinrails, capstans, a bell, a wheel, deck prisms, etc., etc. She's totally managable....

But as you continue to walk the decks for mile upon mile on your endless journey from bow to stern, you get this sinking feeling that this thing is waaaay more complicated than you thought. Somewhere amidships you begin to realize you can't see either end. The ship just seems to disappear into a fog of rigging that obscures any sense of the entire vessel. Suddenly it is overwhelmingly enormous and complex. I found myself looking about trying to figure out which of the four masts I was standing beside--from on deck, you really could never see all four of them at once!

For someone who is used to knowing what each line aboard ship is for and what it does--and maybe even its name--being lost in this cloud of rigging was a really creepy and disorienting experience.

Hundreds of lines running here, there, everywhere....

...and then to think of the strain on all those lines. Some of the yardarms alone were up to 5 or 10 tons. Add sail, wind, rain, and ice and the total load on this tangle of rigging is strong enough to move a mountain...a mountain of steel and canvas. These big windlasses and the steel wire top-ropes, shrouds, and stays were absolutely necessary on such a craft (apparently, no matter how aged and rusty).

Sailing ships have long been called a machine for harnessing the forces of nature--but seeing how many lines and cables it takes to rig a sailing ship is a stark reminder of the sheer power of nature. How hard man works to create something just to catch the breeze.

After a rather long walk I finally reached the quarterdeck of the Kruzenshtern. The wheel, binnacle, and steering box (as big as a shed) were all varnished up nicely and the bronzework polished down to a fine sheen. But even here the size of the vessel could not go unnoticed. Two steering wheels were fitted so that up to four men could get a solid grasp on them to steady the huge ship in a gale--and they would be lashed to the ship so that a kick on the rudder from a wave didn't jerk the wheel, snagging a spoke in a man's clothing and heaving him skyward over the rail.


On that note I was ushered over the rail and down the gangplank as hordes of people gathered for their chance to come aboard the great ship. She was a little intimidating, I must say, but still a grand ship to explore.


Onward to the mighty Sedov!--Russia's other enormous 4-masted bark (I tell ya, some countries have it all....).

Sedov was also a German-built vessel constructed in Kiel in 1921, sailing under the name the Magdalene Vinnen II. Only slightly smaller than the Kruzenstern, she crosses the line at 108 meters in length and a rated 3,500 tons displacement. She sailed on all oceans before the war. Then she, too, was transferred to the Soviet Union as a war prize. Becoming a training ship for the Soviet Navy, she managed to dodge the scrap yards that dismantled so many of the great 'Cape Horners'--that last generation of commerical sailing ships.

It is difficult to convey the scale of these wind-driven craft. They are as elegant and graceful as a swan, but tough and solid as a battleship--at least, in appearance. They are stunning creations the likes of which our species seems to have forgotten how to create. Few modern ships can be said to have 'graceful lines' or 'tranquility of form'. Now they all look like a box. But ships like Sedov--solid, elegantly rigged, and fitted out with billowing sails and fluttering flags--are an experience to behold.


Two days after experiencing the Kruzenshtern, I headed over to the Sedov. She was open to the public, but clearly not all visitors were welcome. Like most of the sailing ships in port, rat-guards had been placed on all the mooring lines. Rat-guards are, well, guards to keep rats from climbing aboard ship--before you even think of making a joke about Russian sailing ships, I'll have you know that even the American aircraft carriers still rig these every time they are in harbor.

I am not sure exactly what kind of death-defying thrill rats obtain from skittering out on the mooring lines to get aboard ship (where they are reduced to nibbling lead-based paint and often dispatched with a belaying pin) but an artistic crewman aboard the Sedov seems to have taken the matter to the level of psychological warfare.

Besides being over water, boarding on the mooring lines is a bit dangerous in other ways. After all, there is a 3,500-ton ship pulling on the other end of it. This line up forward had come under such enormous strain that it had actually torn right through the steel plating of the bulwarks!

If I were a rat, I would definitely think twice about this ship.

However, being a biped with opposable thumbs, I promptly set about finding a way to board the ship.

Walking along the pier beneath both Kruzenshtern and Sedov felt a bit like being stuck outside a great fortress or the Great Wall of China. They really were like huge walls...

...and finding a way over the top of it usually involved a wobbly gangplank, 20-30 Swedish crowns, and a number of stern-faced, uniformed 16 year-old Russian naval cadets.

Rummaging through my pockets for every coin I had, I managed to scrape together the boarding fee and stake out a spot in the queue. Usually waiting in line is about as interesting as a 5lb bag of fertilizer, but waiting alongside that incredible ship, gazing up at the rigging, was well-worth the wait. It was assigned admiration time.

But alas, my lunch money was gone and I was passing through the bulwark onto the deck of the floating giant.

Once again, I found myself in a surreal universe of paralell lines--rigging, deck planks, spars, Russian navy shirts--all paralell, or nearly so. But what a forest of rigging! Incredible.... One thing that always amazes me on the bigger ships is how the crews (about 270-strong) manage to learn all these lines amidst everything else a naval cadet is being forced to learn and do--and many cadets are only aboard for a month or two!

Heading aft I passed by the skylights from the galley. Perhaps my palatte is insufficiently international, but the aroma of borsch cooking below just didn't have the same affect on me as the Cuauhtemoc's Mexican cuisine. Judging by my brief olfactory encounter, I suspect it is something of an 'acquired taste'.

These ships really are a marvel of organization and coordination, though. They are as complex as a power grid and yet they move! The whole thing moves--and moves where someone decides it should move--and it is powered by the unpredicatable whims of nature! Remarkable. The choas of weather and hundreds of lines, men, and sails choreographed into the breatheless, smooth motion of a tall ship under way. Sailing ships could really be a whole conceptual model for some branch of chaos theory...


Yet to those who know the wind and tide and know the workings of their ship, there is plenty of logical, practical, and functional order in what appears to many as an unfathomable mess of hemp, canvas, and steel. To the seasoned tall ship sailor, it is all as clear as day.

To others, it is just a place to play, to explore, and to experieince. The children of Sweden really made the most of Sedov....


...ringing in their generation and keeping the dreams of sailing the high seas alive...

But all that clichéd rhetoric aside, Sedov with her miles of hempen line, the steering wheels, the bell, and so forth was clearly a great playground--even for me. I was a kid in a candy shop for five days while these ships were in port!

I mean...you can see I photographed just about everything. You should see how much I didn't put up on the blog! But then again, when you see the ship's name emblazoned on a beautifully polished bronze plaque fitted to the top of each bollard head, who wouldn't take a picture?


I even photographed the safety chain securing the starboard anchor for goodness sake! But how could I not? It was so thoroughly corroded to the bollard that I half expected it to be an original from 1921. I mean, what a safety hazard. The steel links were literally flaking apart. Between the corrosion and the flaking, this anchor couldn't be dropped with the work of a dozen men and yet, at the same time, it might just drop itself within the hour.

But amidst all my nautical delight, not everyone was enjoying being aboard. Amidships I found a group of cadets getting a royal chewing-out from one of the senior officers. They were smirking and exchanging glances in a way that suggested that a prank had gone awry--or possibly had just gone very well.

Either way, they ended up being put on work detail and were sent down the gangplank to a waiting truck.

Supplies had arrived for the evening party being thrown in honor of foreign dignitaries invited to the ship--all of the ships were holding banquets...except the Polish ships. They were strangely dark and silent at night.

Paying penance for whatever had happened, the Russian cadets sullenly hauled case after case of beer and Coca-Cola (ironic?) aboard ship. Poor schmucks.

As preparations for the evening event got under way, I debarked from ...the bark...Sedov and headed for home.

But what a sight--the Russian giants Kruzenshtern and Sedov. Magnificent ships.