We’re looking at the latter part of next year. The newest addition to Royal Caribbean’s luxury cruise range, Anthem of the Seas promises a tech-packed, interactive voyage. In Pictures: virtual thrills aboard Anthem of the Seas So we’re moving in a lot of different directions right now because to make our launch date we can’t go linearly, we have to have all these things going. We’ve laid out the interior, we’ve begun making some spars. We have the first three layers of our composite deck on, the planking. CL: What stage of the project are you at now?ĪO: Well, we’ve got all our structural elements on. We wanted to bring that to the Bay Area, for the youth of the area. We have a great maritime museum here, but not a tall ship that operates not only on the bay but on the ocean on expeditions. We just felt that here in the Bay Area, our nautical history is really fascinating. They represent their cities, their states, their countries. There’s actually a number of them built around the country and around the world, of various sizes, with this in mind. We wanted something about 100ft long on deck, a brigantine which would allow lots of activities for the students. We made some initial attempts to see how we could go ahead with this, design work, figuring out what we wanted from the boat and the size of the boat. Chris Lo: What was behind the decision to go ahead with such a large undertaking?Īlan Olson: We were actually thinking about this back in the 80s.

We spoke to Olson to get the inside line on the brigantine, its conception and the challenges involved in combining the technologies of the 19th and 21st centuries.

The $6.2m ship, which is expected to launch in 2016 and start operations in 2017, will be used to take groups of young students out on to the water to learn traditional sailing skills, as well as getting better acquainted with the Bay Area’s rich maritime history and marine ecology.

But that changed in 2013, when construction began on the Matthew Turner, a two-masted brigantine designed by tall ship specialist Tri-Coastal Marine with a deck length of 100ft and berths for 38 passengers. In the San Francisco Bay Area – the heart of US Pacific trade in the late 19th century – there hasn’t been a wooden tall ship construction project in more than a century.

From topsail schooners to barques and brigantines, the craft of traditional shipbuilding has carved itself a small niche in the modern world, with tall ships still used for sail training, educational programmes and as alternatives to contemporary cruise liners. Commercial shipping today is dominated by diesel engines and massive container vessels, but around the world there are those who are keeping our nautical past alive through the construction of traditional tall ships.

Wooden ship construction