"A Much More Amazing Voyage Than I Anticipated"

September 7, 2011 at 10:07 AM

Picton Castle crew prepares for Deep Sea Voyage 2012

by Robert Hirtle

Lunenburg's globe-trotting tall ship Picton Castle will depart on its next epic voyage in May 2012.

LUNENBURG - Capt. Dan Moreland and the crew of Picton Castle are already making plans for their next epic adventure, "Deep Sea Voyage 2012," which is set to shove off next May.

This time, rather than plotting their usual course of an around-the-world circumnavigation, the ship will re-create a journey encompassing the Atlantic basin, similar to a trip it embarked on back in 2008.

"That was a wonderful voyage. We sort of did it the last time not really anticipating doing it again," Capt. Moreland explains. "But it's a bit of a nostalgic tour, the Picton Castle having been born and raised in the North Sea and the North Atlantic, fishing and World War II and serving throughout the war in the Royal Navy. We thought, let's go back to her old ports."

Capt. Moreland himself had spent considerable time working in Europe and has several contacts in many of the continent's ports, a fact which also made that voyage appealing to him.

"It turned out to be ... a much more amazing voyage than I anticipated," he says. "Our initial agenda really got taken over by what a great trip it was [and] we met a lot of the old crew of the ship in the most unlikely places."

One of those locales was the tiny south coast fishing village of Baltimore, Ireland, where the ship "kind of just ducked in.

"I heard it was a nice place, and we found in this town ... that's about the size of Blue Rocks, three men that had been fishing on the Picton Castle," Capt. Moreland says. "That was kind of cool and that the Royal Lifeboat Station had actually stood by the fishing vessel Picton Castle in a horrendous gale. They hadn't rescued, but they launched and gone out and that's on their historical placard. I had no idea. That was in 1953."

Those ties make Baltimore a natural stop on next year's voyage, which also will include visits to ports in Wales, France, Finland, Denmark, Norway, England, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Senegal, Colombia, Panama, Mexico, Cuba, the Bahamas and islands in the Eastern Caribbean as well as a jaunt through the waters of the Spanish Main.

"The world voyage is amazing but it's all in the tropics, and this combines northern latitude sailing and old-world sailing ship ports with West Africa and the Caribbean and that's a wonderful contrast," Capt. Moreland says. "And we found it made for a very strong training trip. Because we're going fewer miles in the same amount of time, we can, with confidence, sail every inch of the way. If we have to wait a few days for weather, it doesn't really matter."

The voyage will be one year in length and trainees will have the option of signing up for the full voyage or for one of three legs, the first of which begins in Lunenburg with ship preparations in April 2012.

The second leg starts in Copenhagen, Denmark, August 28 with the final leg embarking from Grenada, West Indies, on January 4, 2013.

More information on the 2012 voyage is available at http://www.picton-castle.com.