By Samara

About halfway through evening watch the wind started to pick up. After a few days of traveling on nothing more than a light breeze (so light, in fact, that we were able to go swimming because the ship was not moving at all!) I was excited to put up some canvas. We set the square sails and went back below deck to finish our nightly watch duties. We were travelling north to round the “thumb” of Michigan and as our latitude increased so did the wind that filled our sails. We acted quickly to set more sails and by the end of my watch we were sailing faster than 8 knots!

When we picked up speed we also found ourselves heeled over and many of the guest crew aboard emerged from their cabins to come see what was happening on deck. There is not much else like the rush of speeding through the water on a tall ship and being the last night before we reached Bay City no one wanted to miss a thing. But when the next watch came up on deck to relieve us my exhilaration gave way to exhaustion and within moments climbing into my bunk Europa’s gentle rocking put me to sleep.

The following afternoon we docked here in Bay City, and just as it did in Toronto and Cleveland time is flying! We were officially welcomed to Bay City Thursday night at the crew BBQ and Friday morning the festival opened. Last night after the gates closed each ship hosted a dockside sponsor party, and tonight hard rock legend Alice Cooper will be headlining a concert on the festival grounds. The sound check is going on now and considering that it can be heard across the river I imagine that his “Theatre of Death Tour 2010” is going to be quite a show.

Despite the heat I am having a great time in Bay City, a place that clearly has tall ship fever! Almost every restaurant, shop, and bar in town has a sign in the window welcoming the tall ships, and I am never out of sight of something nautical themed – even the planetarium has a special show about celestial navigation as it was used by sailors before modern GPS technology. On Thursday night after the BBQ I followed the advice of one of my shipmates and went into town with some friends. Sure enough, we found ourselves in a crowd of sailors and tall ship enthusiasts enjoying a live band preform sea shanties!

The festival is almost halfway over I am looking forward to seeing what else Bay City has in store, exploring outside the festival gates in my off time, and climbing aboard the Denis Sullivan for the race to Duluth.