The conditions couldn’t have been better for the start of the first leg of The Tall Ships’ Races, Baltic Series to St Petersburg on Sunday 5 July, with bright sunshine and a light building breeze. Although the start had to be postponed an hour, until 1800, because the Class C and D members of the fleet were unable to reach the start area in time, the wind had time to build to 12-18 knots from the north-north-east leaving the 101 ships heading across line in an westerly direction, powered up under full sail in perfect formation.
One of the most amazing sights of the day had to be amount of spectators who turned out to watch the ships head out to the start. It was standing room only on every beach in the vicinity, and reportedly over one million spectators turned out today alone, making a total of over two and a half million people visiting Gdynia over the last four days.
Back on the race course five miles offshore, the majestic Class A ships ghosted their way to the line and, with less than 10 minutes to go, set full sail and were soon to be seen heading off in the sunset bound for St Petersburg. Mir, the white and blue-hulled Russian ship, with Captain Yury Galkin at the helm, demonstrated a textbook style start and led from the committee vessel end of the line. However, hot on her heels was the Sail Training Association of Poland’s Barquentine Pogoria, with the eye-catching green Barque Alexander von Humboldt from Germany third across the line.
The Class B fleet started half an hour later at 1830 and here it was the gaff schooners who took control, with the pretty Finnish ship Albanus crossing the line in first position, with Rupel – Jan Vandenborne’s ship from Belgium in second, and the Dutch gaff schooner De Gallant in third.
With a steadily increasing breeze as the start sequence progressed, one of the entries – St IV (Estonia) – in the highly competitive Class C fleet had a false start and had to sail round the end of the line to restart correctly. Meanwhile the Latvian sloop Spaniel was seen jostling for a position and in true America’s Cup style crossed the start line bang on time. The Polish sloop Gaudeamus was also in the hunt and took second over the line just ahead of another local yacht, Purga.
The Class Ds were probably the most line shy but it was Hebe III from the Czech Republic who led the way to St Petersburg ahead of the Russian yacht Siberia and Timo Lappalainen’s ketch Feelings (Finland).
As the fleet sailed off into the sunset teams were hard at work planning their route to St Petersburg leaving the Swedish island of Gotland to port and working out their strategies for the first of two waypoints at Glotovi Madal Light. The second waypoint is at Tallin Light, which must be left to starboard.
