A few days before the crowds are expected to pour into Greenport for the Tall Ships 2015 festival, one Tall Ship arrived early, much to the delight of the steady stream of spectators who headed to the waterfront to breathe in her majesty.
The Kalmar Nyckel, expected to arrive today, sailed into the harbor yesterday. The A.J. Meerwald is expected to arrive today as scheduled. Next, the Lynx and Picton Castle are expected to enter Greenport Harbor about noon tomorrow; the Sagres is expected to enter Greenport Harbor about 11 a.m. on Friday. And the centerpiece of the event, the Hermione, is expected to arrive in Greenport at about 7:30 a.m. on Monday.
According to its website, the present-day Kalmar Nyckel is as floating classroom, where the Kalmar Nyckel Foundation’s award-winning educational programs aim to teach students about Delaware’s rich maritime and colonial history.
The ship is owned and operated by the Kalmar Nyckel Foundation, a non-profit organization that offers “a broad array of sea- and land-based learning and recreational experiences,” the site says.
The ship was built at the Kalmar Nyckel Foundation’s shipyard on Wilmington’s 7th Street Peninsula and was launched into the Christina River in 1997, about 200 yards downstream from the site of the original ship’s first landing at “the Rocks” in March of 1638.
The vessel, “a full-scale and faithful re-creation” of Peter Minuit’s original flagship that founded the colony of New Sweden on the Delaware, the new Kalmar Nyckel provides a platform for the Foundation’s educational programming as well as a venue for diplomatic, recreational, governmental, and commemorative functions, “a sea-going ‘good will ambassador’ for the state of Delaware, the site explains.
