This month, under the banner of Sail250 America, a fleet of majestic international ships from the age of sail will make its way up the Chesapeake Bay.
You would have to be living under a rock to have missed the upcoming 250th anniversary of the signing of our Declaration of Independence. Assuming you have not been so housed, you also know that a variety of events, from solemn remembrances to celebratory festivals, are ahead of us.
A fleet of international ships from the age of sail will assemble to help us mark the anniversary. That fleet, joined under the banner of Sail250 America, has wrapped up their first United States stop, New Orleans. By the middle of June, they will gather in the Lynnhaven Anchorage, off Virginia Beach, awaiting their grand formal entrance into the Chesapeake Bay.
The Bay will be blessed with two main ports of call for the visiting Sail250 fleet, Norfolk from June 19 to 23 and Baltimore from June 25 to 28. In addition, some of the fleet will visit other Southern Bay ports including Alexandria, Cape Charles, Chesapeake, Hampton, Onancock, Portsmouth, Richmond, Smithfield, and Yorktown. As you can imagine, there will be landside festivals adjoining the tall ship visits on the Bay. More on those festivals later. Let’s talk ships!
The lead ship in this amazing fleet of sail is the United States Coast barque Eagle. Built in Germany and commissioned the Horst Wessel in 1936, she was taken as war reparations after World War II. This is a common story. Most of this fleet of 14 military sail training vessels gracing the Bay’s waters this month changed hands as a result of either World War I or II.
After WW II the Horst Wessel was renamed the Eagle and commissioned to serve as the sail training vessel of the United States Coast Guard Academy. To this day she fulfills the role of training midshipmen from the Academy and candidates from the USCG Officer Candidate School. She also does a stellar job representing the United States on goodwill voyages around the world.
Sail250 will reunite four sister ships. The Mircea, a sail training vessel for the Romanian Navy, is the sister ship of the Eagle, Sagres from Portugal, and Gorch Fock from Germany. All four were built at the legendary Blohm & Voss Shipyard in Hamburg, Germany. The “sisters” will be on full display in Norfolk and will be purposefully berthed near each other in Baltimore.
The fleet includes one of the largest sailing vessels in the world at 372 feet overall. According to the Sail250 Virginia website, “The Esmeralda was built in Cadiz, Spain, originally for the Spanish Navy. An explosion and fire damaged the ship and sent the yard into near bankruptcy. The governments of Spain and Chile arranged a deal to transfer ownership of the vessel to Chile in return for forgiving loans owed from the Spanish Civil War. Work resumed and the barquentine was commissioned in 1953. Esmeralda now sails as the sail training vessel of the Chilean Navy.”
As you will recall from your high school history classes, France has a special bond with America given their support of the fledgling colonies in the Revolutionary War. The French Navy will send two vessels to help us celebrate. The Belle Poule is a sail training vessel of the French Navy, part of their sail training fleet at the Ecole Navale, the French equivalent of our Naval Academy. Launched in 1932, the schooner is based on the French “Paimpolaise” style fishing vessels, which were built to fish the waters off Iceland.
Also from France, the 79-foot L’Intrepide will visit Portsmouth during Harborfest, June 19 to 22, and spend a week in Annapolis at the United States Naval Academy (USNA). She is a modern sloop, launched in 2010. This summer she will undertake a transatlantic voyage with midshipmen from both Ecole Navale and the USNA. The crew of Mids will study leadership, seamanship, and navigation while sailing approximately 10,000 nautical miles. After Harborfest and a week in Annapolis, she will head to New York for the gala celebrations around Independence Day. Besides marking our 250th anniversary, the visit of both ships will mark the 400th anniversary of the French Navy.
Add to the list majestic sailing vessels from Argentina, Columbia, Ecuador, India, Peru, Spain, Sweden, and Uruguay and a veritable fleet from the home country, and you get a living reference to the age of sail. Okay, yes, there will be waterside festivals, too.
In Norfolk the 50th Harborfest will kick off with a parade of sail arriving in downtown Norfolk at noon(ish) on Friday, June 19. Norfolk will include two fireworks shows, Friday and Saturday evenings. The Blue Angels will do a flyover to announce the parade of sail’s arrival downtown. After the tall ships dock, what follows will be the classic mix of multi-stage open-air music and food over three days, spiced up by those picturesque tall ships which will be open at various times to public tours.
Baltimore follows Norfolk with events beginning June 24 and running through the weekend. The tall ship fleet will be spread around the Inner Harbor as will the food, music, and fun we have all come to expect from downtown Baltimore in full party dress. Besides the tall ship visitation, Baltimore will offer not one, but two full Blue Angels shows, Saturday and Sunday June 27 and 28.
Find more details about Virginia events at sail250virginia.com and Maryland events at sail250md.org.
by Mike Pitchford, Jim Kizziar, and Frank Slattery
The Dean of the Bay Festivals
Born and raised in Norfolk, Karen Scherberger did not stray far when it was time to attend college. Old Dominion University was just down the street from her birth home, and she happily made her way there, completing her undergraduate degree in 1976. Despite a brief stint out of town to earn her master’s degree at the University of Georgia, she was back home in time to serve as a volunteer on Norfolk’s first Harborfest. Her Norfolk Festival repertoire grew from there.
In 1976 Operation Sail, OpSail for short, put together an international fleet of tall ships to help America celebrate our bicentennial. Norfolk became a stop for the tall ships on their way to New York for the gala July Fourth birthday celebration. That visit of tall ships sparked local leadership to “rinse and repeat” in 1977, the first annual Harborfest.
Norfolk will celebrate the 50th annual Harborfest in mid-June. Through them all, Scherberger has played a role. In the early years, she served as a volunteer with progressively increased responsibilities. In a few short years, she went from picking up trash to leading all of the festival’s events on land (multiple stages and a plethora of entertainers).
For the first few years, Harborfest was a one-off annual event. In 1983 the success of Harborfest begat Norfolk Festevents Ltd., an organization focused on year-round festival events and activities for the evolving downtown waterfront. No surprise, Scherberger was chosen to lead the start-up venture.
Since that first OpSail stop in Norfolk in 1976, the city has seen a makeover that is nothing short of amazing. The industrial downtown waterfront of the 50s and 60s was first abandoned, sparked to life again by the early Harborfests, and reborn with promenades, parks, and people living downtown. One of the keys to that revitalization was the active festival programming brought to us by Norfolk Festevents, whose driving force is Scherberger.
That once abandoned downtown waterfront has been graced with an amazing six-acre waterfront park, a Jim Rouse festival marketplace, a modern take on a maritime museum, a cruise ship dock, and thousands and thousands of new residential units. This landmark urban revitalization has many mothers but only one true catalyst: the waterfront festivals that brought people to downtown for plain old fun.
It is hard to separate the success of Norfolk Festevents from that of Scherberger. Her hand at the tiller over 43 years is unmistakable and thoroughly remarkable. Downtown Norfolk would not be what it is today without Festevents, and Festevents would not be the premier waterfront festival organization it is without Scherberger.
Bruce Bishop, an early Harborfest chair, who has served on the Norfolk Festevents board of directors since inception, called out Scherberger’s unique personal characteristics that made the magic: “There are very few people who are both visionary and detail oriented.”
Bishop knew from the start that the job bringing Norfolk Festevents to life called for that combination. “Fortunately,” he said, “we managed to find that unusual combination of traits in Karen when we hired her to lead Norfolk Festevents.”
Over the years Scherberger’s work has spawned dozens of similar organizations. She is a teacher, an advocate, and a coach to so many of her peers.
Scherberger once anticipated a career in higher education. In fact, she was working in the administration at her alma mater, Old Dominion University, as she volunteered to work on the earliest Harborfests. She has since become the “Dean” of waterfront festival organizations, a title well-earned and so well deserved.
by Mike Pitchford
