Not Your Traditional Halloween

by Caitlín

Everyone should know that Sea Scouts are too old to go trick-or-treating, so we didn't. Instead we celebrated Halloween by going to the schooner Sultana's annual Downrigging Weekend in Chestertown, MD. I had tried to get a large group together to go, but a lot of people already had plans or just weren't interested.

It ended up being just my mom, Daniel, Rebecca, and I going as friends and not making it an official Scout activity. After driving around and around trying to find Gus's un-find-able house, I finally made it there and took him to pick up Daniel, then met Rebecca and my mom at her office to leave from there.

Finally, only an hour later than we had planned, we started off towards Chestertown. As you can tell from Rebecca's quotes (yes, she's begun bringing her quotebook everywhere, and especially when Gus will be along), it was a pretty weird trip.

Driving up seemed very long. It didn't take as long to to Chestertown by land as it did by water in August when we visited Sultana on our Long Cruise, but of course sitting in a car wasn't as enjoyable as sailing up a river either.

Surprisingly, although there were quite a few people queuing up to see the ships, we found parking very near the dock. Over the rooftops, our first view of the ships: crossed spars, a tangle of rigging against a hurt-your-eyes-blue sky; tall masts topped with colorful pennants a proud reminder of the freedom of the open seas.

Rebecca and I headed straight to the ships, while the boys trailed behind acting unusually bizarre even for them (which they unfortunately kept up for the entire day).

First we went aboard Pride of Baltimore II:

And took lots of pictures of each other, sometimes at the same time...

My mom took one of me at the wheel, a companion to the photo taken at least eight years ago the first time I toured Pride.

A view up the ratlines.

We asked people to take our picture of us all at the wheel of every ship we toured.

Aboard the schooner Virginia:

At the helm of the Lady Maryland.

Lady Maryland's compass. (Notice the goldfish in the corners.)

Probably because she was the most ornate ship attending, there was a line to get on board the Kalmar Nyckel, but it gave me a chance to take a lot of pictures of the carvings and many colors on her hull.

Like the figurehead...

the huge anchor (I wonder if that would hold Amanda Grace?)...

and the rigging. One of the crew members told us as we waited that of the ships at the Downrigging Weekend, Kalmar Nyckel's rigging is the most complicated and does the least.

At the tiller (only it's not called a tiller, I just can't remember the proper name) of Kalmar Nyckel, which works...

...like this. The rudder is on the other side of the transom.

We looked around at other things at the festival and then tried to find somewhere to eat. The waterfront restaurants were all very crowded, but we found one little deli-style place, "Play it Again, Sam," across the street from the Sultana Center.

We sat outside and watched little kids run around in costumes, waiting for it to get dark. Even though the line was long, Gus and Daniel had to go back (separately) and get cupcakes, which they ate like a hobo and a barbarian, respectively:


Once it got dark, we went back to the docks to see the illuminated ships. But because the docks were roped off (I guess to keep people from tumbling into the water) we couldn't get close enough for our cameras to focus, so no pictures there.

But we did get photos of of the fireworks, but those aren't as interesting as a little video of one fifteenth of the firework display: