It’s early Thursday morning, actually not that early, about 7 AM, on the tall clipper ship, the Star Flyer. I’m sitting in the lounge having a coffee and writing in my journal. All is quiet and the ship is running smooth. Most of the passengers are still in their cabins.

Then suddenly, at 8:05, I heard a loud BANG and the ship lurched over quite extremely. I ran out to the deck to see what’s going on. Already, the crew are pulling down sails on this 4 mast, 17 sail ship, although I don’t know how many sails were actually hoisted to begin with. It seems we sailed right into a storm and the bang I heard was a huge gust hitting the mainsails.

Turned out that this wasn’t a big storm, only 1-2 meter waves, but big enough that it was fun but safe. Even with only 3 of the jibs up, the ship was heeled over at 7 degrees. I quickly ran down to my cabin, grabbed my camera, put it in a large freezer zip-lock, and headed back to the deck. This was a 7 day cruise on the Adriatic Sea and in my opinion, just being on this tall ship was the highlight of the trip.

The storm was the icing on the cake!

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