What do you do with 22,000 square feet of sail? Chris Sinnett, Captain of the US Coast Guard training barque, Eagle, says, "It's basic sailing, just a lot of it."

Eagle is among the tall ships that have been calling on Pacific ports since late June as part of the American Sail Training Association's West Coast Challenge. She is due to arrive soon in California. The last time Eagle sailed down the Pacific Coast, I was aboard, Portland to Frisco, and as a small-boat sailor, I had my epiphanies.

Imagine a medium breeze near or forward of the beam. You will see the square-rigger crew "fanning" the uppermost sails—trimming them farther aft—to account for higher wind speeds aloft. (Maxi and America's Cup crews have a different tool kit but the same set of challenges.) In light air the uppermost sails of a square-rigger are again trimmed farther aft than lower sails, to act as telltales and warn the driver if it's time to fall off. Aboard the Eagle, however, you will not hear too-cool-for-school racer lingo like "driver." Before we shoved off from Portland town, the crew was mustered on deck and the cadets were told, "Learn all you can. This is how you become a Coast Guard officer."

I don't know what may have been going through the minds of young cadets as they stood straight, listening to those words, but I have a notion of what they were thinking, three days later, as the light failed and the wind rose and there was a bite to that wind, and the ship was flying too much sail and came the call
ALL HANDS!

All eyes were aloft, up up up to the rigging.

There's this other saying aboard the Eagle:

If you don't let go, you don't fall."

To continue this story in words and pictures, Sail West to
KIMBALL LIVINGSTON'S BLOG.

ASTA Tall Ships Challenge
American Sail Training Association Since late June, the fleet has visited Victoria, British Columbia; Tacoma, Washington; and Port Alberni, British Columbia. The fleet passed through San Francisco, then continued on to Southern California with the following schedule:
Oxnard August 7–10
San Pedro August 15–17
San Diego August 20–24
Dana Point September 6–7

Other vessels of special interest include the replicas of HMS Bounty and Niña; the Sea Education Association's research/sailing school brigantine, Robert C. Seamans; and Canada's 102-foot all-branches-of-the-military training ketch, HMS Oriole.

And yes, it's a race. Competitive sailors know that it's hard enough to assign reliable ratings to slightly different, 35-foot fiberglass sloops, but ASTA says of its competition, "How can you compare the racing of a 60-foot sailboat with a 240-foot sailing ship carrying 10 times as much sail area? A special rating system developed in the European tall ships races is used to assign vessels of any size a relative performance factor. This gives all vessels an equal chance of winning if they are sailed well."

Learn more at sailtraining.org

This was HMS Bounty en route to Victoria, B.C.