Our shipmates included 25 Bulgarian maritime high school students, 2 Bulgarian teachers, and 12 Bulgarian seamen. We had enlisted to sail 500 miles west across the Black Sea to Constanta, Romania, in the regatta’s second race. Kaliakra, and her sistership, Royal Helena, are both 170 feet long, but they looked toy-like when we found them, berthed as they were between the massive 385-foot Sedov from Murmansk and the 305-foot, white-and-yellow Romanian Navy ship Mircea. We were looking for the Bulgarian flagged Kaliakra-a steel-hulled, three-masted barkentine, built in 1984 in Gdansk, Poland, the same shipyard where Lech Walesa launched the Solidarity Movement. Were we sailing into a not-so-cold war? In mid-May, undeterred by these concerns, we found ourselves lugging our gear down a concrete, runway-like pier in the Russian Black Sea port of Sochi. Politics as ever drew in our small group as we sat on a balcony overlooking the Bosphorus, planning our part in the first-ever Black Sea Tall Ships’ Regatta. The advantages of a smaller crew, good performance before the wind and the ability to sail relatively close to the wind while carrying plenty of cargo made it a popular rig at the end of the 19th century. Photo by Bulgarian Maritime Training Center A barkentine has three masts, but only the foremast is square-rigged.
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