Kalmar Nyckel offers sailing adventure in Greenport
The Kalmar Nyckel, a replica of a 17th-century Swedish tall ship, will be in Greenport from July 22 to Aug. 3, offering public sails and deck tours. Credit: Newsday/Thomas A. Ferrara
The Swedish tall ship replica Kalmar Nyckel returns to Greenport from July 22 to Aug. 3 to take Long Islanders out on the water to experience what the captain calls the "romantic adventure element of sailing ships."
The ship is a replica of the 141-foot-long vessel that brought Swedish settlers to Delaware in the 1600s to establish a Swedish colony. "It looks like this amazing movie-style pirate ship," said Lauren Morgens, 45, who has been a captain of the Kalmar Nyckel for close to 20 years.
The Kalmar Nyckel has visited Long Island twice before, coming for a long weekend in 2022 and then for a week in 2023. This time, the ship will be here for about 10 days and will offer deck tours as well as public sails.
The ship is usually docked in Delaware and does public and educational sails there, supported by the Kalmar Nyckel Foundation. It also makes trips to ports along the East Coast.
Kalmar Nyckel Tall Ship
WHEN | WHERE Check website for sail times, deck tour times and to reserve tickets. The ship docks adjacent to the LIRR train station, 104 Fourth St. in Greenport.
COST $75 per adult and $40 per child 12 and younger. There will also be two free Saturday afternoons of deck tours, from 3 to 7 p.m. on July 26 and Aug. 2, Lauren Morgens, a boat captain, said. No reservations are needed for the deck tours, she said.
MORE INFO 302-429-7447, kalmarnyckel.org
Pat Wolkoff, 70, of Oakdale, took one of the sails with a group of eight friends in 2023. They had lunch out and then got on board, and Wolkoff said she was amazed by how many crew members it took to operate the ship — more than 20 in all. "Everybody has a different job. It was really, really cool," she said. "We really had a great day."
During the public voyages, which last 2½ hours each, riders can help the crew haul lines and set the sails if they wish. They can listen to a talk about the original ship’s history — Kalmar is the city in Sweden that helped pay for the ship's journeys across the Atlantic, and Nyckel means key in Swedish.
The ship's first voyage to the New World was in 1638, and it sank in battle in the North Sea of Scotland in 1652.
Riders can also participate in one of two shipboard scavenger hunts — one designed for children and the other for ages 12 and older and adults, Morgens said. The younger scavenger hunt participants will look for items such as carvings of dogs in the ship’s hull, Morgens said. Older participants will need reading skills to find information about the ship. People who complete the scavenger hunts will get some fun pirate treasure, Morgens said.
"I look at these as ways for people to access things they didn’t know they should ask about but are interesting," Morgens said of the scavenger hunts. "This is a very interactive way to get at some of that."
There will also be two free Saturday afternoons of deck tours, from 3 to 7 p.m. on July 26 and Aug. 2, Morgens said. No reservations are needed for the deck tours, she said.
The ship, which can carry up to 49 passengers, is staffed by a combination of paid staff and volunteers who sleep on the boat. John Eastlund, 75, of Wantagh, for instance, travels to Delaware once a month to volunteer on the ship there and will be living on board in Greenport for about a week.
He’ll be working as a deckhand, doing "whatever the captain tells me," he said. That can include swabbing the deck, handling the sails and chatting with those on board about the ship’s past, when it had no engine, no electricity and no modern plumbing (the ship does have all those things now). Eastlund’s grandparents are from Sweden.
Katherine Caudle, 42, who was born in Bay Shore but now lives in Delaware, is another volunteer; she'll be on board the second weekend the boat is docked in Greenport.
"It lets you experience what it would have been like to sail on a 17th century tall ship," she said of the cruises. "It was very much a hands-on experience. You had to do a lot of manual labor."
That's still the case today when the boat is under sail. "That's what's making the boat move," she said.
Nicole Froelich, an accountant in her 40s from Ronkonkoma, is Caudle's cousin and plans to get on board with her children, ages 13 and 8. "I home-school my kids," Froelich said. "It's great to factor into some of their history studies. We're big on hands-on field trip learning."
Beth Whitehouse writes about families, parenting and great things to do with the kids on Long Island. She’s been a Newsday editor and shared a 1997 Newsday staff Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800.
