A Swedish Training Bark Visits

The navy destroyer left us after a few days, and then a 50m Swedish training vessel docked in our marina. They were offering tours of their ship (above deck) so we took the boys over to have a look around. The vessel name is Gunilla and is from the island of Öckerö on the west coast of Sweden, you can read more about the ship and its program here.  It is a training vessel and had students on board that had left Santa Domingo 11 days before.  In Sweden, after you have mandatory school (until age 16), you go to gymnasium(gymnasieskola) for 3 years.  All of the 44 students on

 

Gunilla Approaching her Dock

board were 2nd year gymnasium students so they were about 18 years old.  The boat has 11 crew members, but the students have to help with all aspects of the ship; navigation, cooking, cleaning, line handling, sail handling, etc. . The boat is staying in Charleston for 6 days then they are off to Bermuda, the Azores and finally to Belgium where the first year students will get on and the second year students fly home.  We were led on a tour of the ship by one of the students, Samuel. All of the students speak English well and were very friendly and polite. We felt privileged to be allowed on board. 

Trying on the Life Vests

Samuel was a good guide and showed us all around the boat and answered our questions.  He told us that they really liked the Tanger outlets and Walmart here, everything is so cheap! We saw load after load of "stuff" being rolled down the dock to their boat this evening.

Big Lines

Lots of Rigging

I could not imagine handling all those lines, I guess it's good that they have 55 people on board. While they have modern electronics, the rigging is mostly old fashioned stuff:  wooden blocks, square sails, rat lines for climbing the masts.

Wheel House

The steering can be done from inside the wheel house or outside. 

It was very impressive to see these "kids" handling the boat, with really good attitudes and so friendly.