Clipper is a Star

The beautiful old style clipper ship I'm sailing on, the Star Clipper, is a Luxembourg-flagged ship of the line, Belgian-built, and operated by a Swedish company. I was very pleased to discover that the wonderful sails, rigging, and vintage instruments are all fully functional and not fake. I was a little worried that the magnificent sails might be mostly for show, and the ship really gets around by motoring. Thankfully this is not the case; we were purely under wind power for most of the time we were moving. The top speed is 11 nauts under power, and 19.5 nauts under full sail. However this requires a very strong wind. Much of the time our speed under sail was about 5 nauts.

There are 8 power winches that can be used for any of the lines, but many times the crew hauls on the lines manually. The captain is a personable young Russian man, Captain Sergey. The Captain also teaches the Tai Chi classes every morning.

There are 102 passengers on board, and about 70 crew. This is nice, because this is significantly under full capacity. The interior is beautifully appointed in fine polished wood.

The Star Clipper is also the tallest tall ship in the world. It's part of a fleet of three clipper ships. The other two are the Star Flyer, and the Royal Clipper. The Royal Clipper holds the Guinness world record for largest total sail area: "It measures 133.8 meters in length with 5202 square meters of canvas on five masts with 42 sails reaching 60 meters and was launched in July 2000."

Here's a video of a 360 degree pan from the bowsprit.

Here are some photos of the ship:


Navigational Compass:


Power Winch:


One of the 4 Masts:


Piano Bar:


Tropical Bar:


Pool:


Deck:

Ship's Library:

Control Panel:

Bowsprit: