The Tall Ships are Coming

The tall ships are making another appearance in the Camden-Philadelphia area -- just in time for the nation's birthday.

A three-masted barquentine-style ship with 10,000 square feet of sails looks like it could have pirates for a crew and a mission that includes finding a sunken treasure.

Actually, its crew includes an engineer from Poland and a high school student from Florida. Its mission is a series of races in the American Sail Training Association's Tall Ships Challenge and port visits along the East Coast.

Tall ships like the Pogoria and 11 others scheduled to arrive Wednesday in Camden and Philadelphia are powered by the wind, which makes even the newest ones artifacts that are not the most practical for shipping or patrolling the seas.

In the modern world, the schooners, barques and Viking longship are useful for something other than moving people or cargo across the seas: They're educational tools.

On the waterfront of Philadelphia and Camden, they will be open to the public for tours as part of the area's extensive Fourth of July festivities. It's the first time in four years a parade of tall ships has come to the Philadelphia area.

They are also educational at sea.

The Unicorn, a topsail schooner owned by a New Jersey couple, is used largely for corporate team-building exercises.

The Zenobe Gramme, owned by the Belgian government, is staffed by naval recruits who get a taste of sea life before they get specialized training, many in land-based vocations.

Then there's the Pogoria, flagship for the Polish Sail Training Association in Gdansk.

The ship has about 20 crew members, three of them permanent; the rest, including the captain, are volunteers.

At the Port of Wilmington on Tuesday morning, many of the crew were slow to come on deck from their cramped quarters after a party the night before with the crew of the Zenobe Gramme.

But Jacek Truszkowski, 53, an engineer in Gdansk, Poland, was on deck early. He's spent about four months, in stints of a few weeks at a time, aboard the vessel.

With his mug of coffee resting perilously on the ship's rail, he looked up at the sails, which are unfurled with muscle power and no help from electric winches.

For Truszkowski, there's no need to venture aloft anymore, though. "That's for young people," he said.

Truszkowski's job is navigation, which is easier than it used to be, thanks to the introduction of some 21st century technology. A global positioning system helps pinpoint the ship's location.

"For some sailors, it's difficult for them to imagine how it was possible to sail without a GPS receiver," Truszkowski said.

Bill Dahlstrom, 15, from Orlando, Fla., is spending part of his summer on the crew of the Pogoria.

Unlike many of the teenagers who board the vessel -- be they from Poland, the United States or elsewhere -- he's an experienced sailor.

But not of a vessel this big.

"It (Pogoria) has three masts instead of one," Dahlstrom said. "And you can climb on them"

Bromisaw Tarnacki captained the Pogoria in three races between Miami and Philadelphia. Like the other volunteer crew members, he'll head home from Philadelphia in the next week as a new group replaces them.

In his day job, Tarnacki is a naval architect who helped design the Pogoria 24 years ago.

"The young people -- they not only sail, they also cook in the galley and clean the ship," Tarnacki said. "This is their education."

The tall ships will be open to the public on the Camden and Philadelphia waterfronts from 10am through 5pm each day Thursday through Sunday.

Tickets to see all the ships are $5.

Also available are passes for $10 that include tours of all the ships and a roundtrip ride aboard the Riverlink Ferry that connects the Philadelphia and Camden waterfront.

Children under 3 get in free.

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Author: NBC10/AP