The royal treatment

Boat/US Magazine, July, 2003 by Tony Gibbs

Mirrored upward, the early morning sunlight danced lazily across the cabin's overhead, reflecting the ship's motion--the same slow, gentle roll that had lolled me to sleep the night before. I turned over and saw that my wife, Lynne, was already awake.

"I was wondering," she said, "how we could make our bathroom at home as nice as this one."

Not just the bathroom, I thought. From the marble and Jacuzzi to the mahogany paneling and built-in TV to the private veranda overlooking the Caribbean, our deluxe cabin was a big step up from what I was used to back in California.

My glance went to the side table beside our king-size bed. On it, still vertical after eight hours underway, was a bud vase containing a single rose--and the vase was not screwed down. (I'd checked.) I couldn't imagine a more perfect definition of our ship's stability.

We'd boarded the five-masted square-rigger Royal Clipper about 12 hours earlier, but my first evening afloat was shrouded in a somewhat hazy glow. Part of the cause was a crack-of-dawn flight from San Juan, PR, to Barbados, followed by a couple of sneaky rum drinks, and topped off by a dusty, luggage-laden stroll across Bridgetown.

Our walk, as I recall, was intended to stretch our legs a bit after the two-and-a-half hour flight. But Lynne's suitcase had wheels and mine didn't. By the time we staggered into Barbados's impressive new cruise ship terminal, my legs may not have been stretched, but my arms felt lengthened well beyond anthropoid.

When I first saw Royal Clipper at pier-side, a few minutes later, she looked surprisingly small--but then she was tied up right behind a vast, ultra-modern cruise ship, the sort of vessel that appeared to have sprung from the brain of a confectioner rather than a naval architect. Only with closer acquaintance did her true size become apparent.

Though square-rigged sailing ships have just about vanished from our oceans, they have left us present-day sailors with a racial memory of grandeur, power, and beauty. And Royal Clipper is the biggest of her kind--nearly 440 feet long, with a 54-foot beam and an 18.5-foot draft, she displaces 5,000 tons.

Although she is a new ship from keel to mast truck and, as I would discover, amazingly sophisticated, her size and general appearance aren't wholly original: She is a sort of nautical hommage, and her design inspiration was that 1905 giant of the seas, the Preussen. Like that vessel, Royal Clipper has five masts. (To answer the obvious question, they're named fore, main, middle, mizzen, and jigger.) The tallest towers nearly 200 feet, and her total sail area is 56,000 square feet.

Like the other two Star Clipper vessels, Royal Clipper sails under the flag of Luxembourg--blue and white horizontal stripes overprinted with a scarlet lion rampant--and her crew hail from two dozen nations. All seem to be at least bilingual, hut perhaps the most linguistically accomplished is Cruise Director Jenny Schacht, who is capable of being informative and diplomatic in seven languages.

Dinner at 8

Escorted to our main deck cabin, Lynne and I unpacked, goggling at our surroundings. It required an effort to drag ourselves out of our mini-paradise for dinner, but it turned out to be a good decision.

One seemingly small thing that had attracted me to Royal Clipper was the absence of seat assignments for her 200-some passengers. Our table that first night had a cosmopolitan cast--besides us, there were two young Brits in show business, a Belgian lady who spoke no English, a honeymoon couple, and a jolly, uniformed gent who looked like a seagoing version of Claude Rains.

His four-striped shoulder boards had made me think he must be the captain, but he turned out to be another Belgian, Chief Engineer Louis Deravet. By this time, his English was probably in better shape than mine, especially after 15 minutes' conversation with the Belgian lady on my right. (I hadn't realized how different Belgian French was from the New Jersey high school version 1 was dredging up from memory.)

I'd fully intended to handle the food part of dinner with reserve. After all, I remembered the cruise ship industry's own statistic--that the average passenger on a one-week voyage gains five pounds. Blame it on the surroundings, or linguistic stress, or just uncontrollable greed, but before I knew what was happening, my vitello tonnato had vanished without a trace, and the turkey stuffed with olives was not far behind. I truly meant to stop there, and if dessert had been anything but a superbly glutinous trifle, I'm sure my will power would have kicked in. Well, almost sure.

The Chief Engineer excused himself early: We were sailing -- yes, sailing -- out of the harbor, but his presence was required on deck just in case. As I was to discover, Royal Clipper's Ukrainian skipper, Sergey Paslichenko, took his sailing seriously A slight, rather formal man, Captain Pashchenko had served his apprenticeship in the then-Soviet navy, and had sailed in its training ship, the massive Kruzensbtern.