The brig USS Niagara docked in Lake Superior at the Duluth Tall Ships Festival on Friday, Aug. 19, 2016. (Aaron J. Brown)
On Friday, the family and I made the trek down to Duluth for the 2016 Tall Ships Festival, which runs through Sunday. I love history. I love ships. Good times.
I won’t lie, this event was considerably more crowded than the previous Tall Ships events we had attended. In fact, we attended our first Tall Ships by mistake. We wandered in after eating lunch at a nearby restaurant, wondering why these old ships were docked by Bayfront.
Tall Ships now consumes the city, packs the hotels, and shuts down traffic for miles.
I heard an early estimate that Tall Ships sold more than 320,000 pre-sale tickets, not counting the thousands more who walked up. Duluth’s population is around 90,000.
We got there just after the gates opened Friday and still had to wait an hour and 50 minutes to climb aboard one ship with our general admission tickets. Even the people who shelled out the bucks for the “Fast Pass” tickets were stuck waiting a lot longer than they expected. By midday, wait times were up to three hours or more.
I love those ships, though. And the giant six-story rubber duck in Bayfront was a fun touch, even if bizarrely unrelated to 19th Century sailing vessels.
Below are some shots from the day:
The rigging on the USS Niagara at Tall Ships 2016. (Aaron J. Brown)
My son Henry and I on deck of the brig Niagara a Duluth Tall Ships 2016.
Cannon! A good reminder that these were warships. (Aaron J. Brown)
The ore freighter American Integrity passes under the Aerial Lift Bridge, as seen from the deck of the replica pirate-hunting ship the USS Niagara. (Aaron J. Brown)
The “World’s Largest Rubber Duck,” a six-story quacker parked in Bayfront Park, is a popular attraction at Tall Ships 2016 in Duluth. (Aaron J. Brown)
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