Tag Archives: Photos

November, 2022:
Sailing Away (Part Three)

By Corey Sandler

Fall has come to New England, the most spectacular time of the year in a beautiful place. Last week included several quintessential autumn days, clear skies above red and yellow leaves along the blue harbor.

That was followed by three days in which we were encased in pea soup fog, a whiter shade of pale. I could not see the ocean from my window, although I knew it was still there.

And now, as I prepare this blog for publication on the first day of November, we’re back in the sun. But those of us who live here know that will change once more; winter is coming.

In offseason, there are two tall ships tied up in Boston harbor, including the USS Constitution, put into service in 1798 and still an active-duty U.S. Navy ship, venturing out into the harbor from time to time to show her colors. And there is the tall ship called Tall Ship–born as Caledonia in 1947–now moored in East Boston and consigned to less glorious use as a floating oyster bar and outdoor saloon.

The appeal of the tall ship is global, at least in nations that border on the sea. I have come across beautiful relics–and a few modern alternatives–in many far corners.

Here are a few more from my collection.

India’s Wave

India’s INS Tarangini, photographed alongside in Bordeaux, France at the 2018 Tall Ships Regatta. Photos by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. The ship is also as depicted under full sail in a postage stamp commemorating her 2003-2004 circumnavigation of the globe.

Tarangini is derived from a Hindi word meaning “waves” or “full of waves.” The handsome three-masted barque was commissioned in 1997 as a sail training ship for Indian Navy.

She is square-rigged on the fore and main masts, and fore-and-aft rigged on the mizzen mast closest to the stern, which means she can carry a lot of sail and move along in many different wind conditions.

In Bordeaux, her crew was attired in full dress uniforms that would have made Lord Nelson proud. In fact, she has a sister ship named Lord Nelson, designed by the same architect. That ship has sailed for a British foundation but as I write her future is uncertain.

Poland’s Pride

Dar Pomorza (Gift of Pomerania) at the pier in Gdynia, Poland. Photo by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved.

Like many members of the surviving fleet of tall ships, Dar Pomorza has gone through many hands over the years. She was built in 1909 in Germany as the training ship Prinzess Eitel Friedrich, wife of a Prussian prince.

In 1920 she was taken as war reparations by Great Britain, then brought to France. In 1929 she was purchased by the Polish community of Pomerania as a training ship for the Polish Naval Academy in Gdynia, which in the period between the world wars was part of the Free State of Danzig along with the nearby city of Gdańsk.

In 1934 and 1935 she traveled around the world, including a passage through the Panama Canal, as an assertion of pride by the nation of Poland even as war clouds gathered back home. When the Second World War began, with the first shots fired at Gdańsk, she was interned in neutral Sweden at Stockholm.

After the war she was returned to Poland, now under Soviet suzerainty. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the ship became a museum ship moored in Gdynia.

She has three sister ships, including Statsraad Lehmkuhl, which I wrote about in an earlier blog post.

Russia, Docked

Kruzenshtern is now a sail training ship for Russia. Photo by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved.

The four-masted barque was built in Germany in 1926 as part of the Flying P-Liners; there are four of these large and fast cargo-carriers still in existence but Kruzenshtern is the last one still sailing.

When she was built in Bremerhaven she was named Padua after the Italian city. After World War II she was surrendered to the Soviet Union as war reparations and renamed after the 19th century explorer Adam Johann von Krusenstern who conducted the first Russian circumnavigation of the globe. He had been born in the Governate of Estonia of the Russian Empire.

As the cargo ship Padua, among her assignments was transporting material to and from South America, and later carrying wheat from Australia.

As Kruzenshtern, the ship’s home port is in the somewhat obscure Russian exclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea; Kaliningrad was formerly the German port of Königsberg but was not given up by Russia even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

I have seen and photographed all four of the surviving Flying P-Liners: Pommern, a museum ship in Mariehamn, Finland; Peking, which spent many years at the South Street Seaport in New York and is now a museum ship in Hamburg, Germany, and Passat, also a museum ship, displayed in Travemünde, Germany.

A Swedish Pleasure Craft

The Swedish Royal Schooner Amphion at the Maritime Museum in Stockholm. Photo by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved.

In the immortal words of Mel Brooks, it’s good to be king. Amphion was the personal pleasure craft of King Gustav III of Sweden.

Launched in 1778, the vessel was intended as a royal yacht and headquarters frigate. In Greek mythology, Amphion was the son of Zeus and a patron of the arts.

Her construction preceded the introduction of marine engines that supplemented windpower on most sailing vessels. Instead, the ship included a galley deck that allowed for a complement of oarsmen.

The ship was lavishly decorated and appointed, but a failure as a vessel unable to make much progress with her two masts and she was too heavy to make much use of the 16 pairs of oars.

On her maiden voyage to Stockholm, poor weather conditions left Amphion shipwrecked in the archipelago of Stockholm, and Gustav III was required to come ashore by tender, most unbefitting a royal.

In 1884, Amphion was broken up for firewood, but her figurehead and stern castle were preserved.

A Polynesian Theory

Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki on display in Stockholm. Photo by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved.

Kon-Tiki is a relatively modern conception of an ancient craft that Norwegian explorer and author Thor Heyerdahl believed might have been used by people from South America to settle Polynesia in pre-Columbian times.

There’s a lot to unpack there.

Heyerdahl from Norway came to Callao, near Lima in Peru to supervise construction of a primitive balsa wood raft with a rudimentary sail.

The book he wrote about his adventure was a major worldwide bestseller, and the documentary he made won an Academy Award in 1951.

Heyerdahl’s trip did indeed establish the possibility that this sort of sailing vessel could have followed currents and winds from Peru to Polynesia.

That said, modern scientists are generally unconvinced that this was the route and method used by the settlers of Polynesia and Hawaii.

But it was a great story, and it is thrill to see the flimsy raft. Not in Peru. Not on one of the islands of Polynesia. But instead in a special museum in Stockholm.

This sort of unexpected connection between disparate places is the reason I travel.

Photos and text copyright Corey Sandler. To obtain copies or otherwise use images, please contact me through my website at www.coreysandler.com

Website security

August, 2022: Northeastern Lights

By Corey Sandler

We take Independence Day seriously here in Boston.

After all, many of the most important early moments of the rebellion against King George began here.

Website security

The Boston Massacre, in which a British soldier fired into a crowd of several hundred protestors, killing five on March 5, 1770. (Referred to by the British as “The Incident on King Street.”)

The Boston Tea Party, the dumping of chests of tea from ships into the harbor to protest a British tax on that essential import, on December 16, 1773 at Griffin’s Wharf. 

The Battle of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, north of Boston.

And the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775, which was a costly victory by the British against colonists in Charlestown on the north side of the harbor in Boston.

None of these events, you will note, occurred on July 4. (And I’d wager that many Americans would fail a basic history quiz on the meaning of the holiday, but I digress.)

The war between the 13 American colonies and Great Britain had been underway for more than a year before the Fourth of July in 1776.

The military occupation of Boston had actually ended in March of 1776 after the rebels had harassed the British with a combination of conventional battles and guerilla warfare. In March, about 1,100 Boston Loyalists departed by ship: some to Nova Scotia or the West Indies and some back to England. The departure of the loyalists nearly emptied Boston’s North End, a Tory stronghold notwithstanding the fact that it was the home of Paul Revere and other important rebels.

On July 4, 1776 the Declaration of Independence was approved by the Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia. Actually, independence was declared on July 2, but the resolution that was passed on July 4 was an explanation of the reasons for the act.

The preamble says:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Recently, it seems as if it has been downhill since then. But I digress again.

So here in Boston, July 4 is a big thing. After two years of the pandemic, things are almost as they were in the Before Times. The party began on July 1, and continued until deep into the night of July 4.

For more than three decades, we lived at sea level on an island south of the Massachusetts coast and our celebration was on the beach, low-key and low-level.

But just before the pandemic arrived, we packed up and moved on up to Boston and up 400 feet in the air to an aerie with views of the harbor on one side and the River Charles on the other. Our Independence Day was spectacular, high-key and high-level.

Here’s some of what we saw.

Boston Harborfest July 2, 2022

Boston Harborfest 2022. Fireworks over the harbor. Photo by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved.

Boston Harborfest 2022. The wharves along the waterfront were at the heart of the growth of Boston into a great trading port. Photo by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved.
Boston Harborfest 2022, Zoomed. Photo by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved.
Boston Harborfest 2022. Griffin’s Wharf, the location of the Boston Tea Party, is at far right. Photo by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved.
Boston Harborfest 2022. Photo by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved.

Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular July 4, 2022

Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular. The Big One, from barges in the River Charles. Photo by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved.
Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular. The River Charles empties into Boston Harbor from the west. The Pops orchestra performed at the Hatch Shell in the Esplanade on the left side of the river. Photo by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved.
Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular. The River Charles is illuminated by the fireworks above. Private boats and tourist vessels lay at anchor in the river; hundreds of thousands of onlookers watched from the Esplanade on the left side and from bridges. Photo by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved.
Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular. Beacon Hill and the Back Bay are at left. Fenway Park, home to the Boston Red Sox is left of the iconic Citgo sign (the red triangle.) On the right side of the river is Cambridge, which includes Harvard and MIT. Photo by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved.

All photos copyright Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you would like to obtain or use an image, please contact me.

To see portfolios of some of my travel photos, www.coreysandler.myportfolio.com or www.coreysandler2.myportfolio.com

September 2020:
Imagination Out of Focus

Website security

By Corey Sandler

Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality. So said Nikos Kazantzakis, author of Zorba the Greek.

We’re working (some of us, to be precise) to change our present reality to something close to our past reality. I am hopeful we will eventually get beyond the know-nothings and the do-nothings.

But as of the moment, we’re not yet out of the woods.

Or to be more precise, in our case, seven or so months into this pandemic we’re not yet into the city or out on the open ocean.

We live along the water and Boston is still something close to a ghost town; the morning after a zombie apocalypse with just a handful of (mostly) masked people scurrying about. On my early-morning power walks there are days when I am the only one crossing the street in Downtown Crossing and Boston Common is rarely shared.

The Black Falcon cruise terminal in Boston has not had a cruise ship make a call since late in 2019 and probably will go this entire year without a visit. Across the harbor Logan International Airport is open but nearly empty, with a nearly total stoppage to international flights and a minimal amount of domestic traffic.

I am sure there are still places worthy of a photograph and I am always ready, but I have mostly been working on developing my editing skills and thinking about new ways to see old places.

One more quote, from the visionary cynic Mark Twain: You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

In that spirit, here are some photos from my collection that I have revisited with new eyes and a refocused imagination.

A Martian Sky over Valencia, Spain. Photo art by Corey Sandler. Copyright 2020, all rights reserved.
Old South Meeting House, Boston. Photo art by Corey Sandler. Copyright 2020, all rights reserved.
A Wall to the Sky. Alanya, Turkey. Photo art by Corey Sandler. Copyright 2020, all rights reserved.
Painting with Light. Acadia National Park, Bar Harbor, Maine, U.S. Photo art by Corey Sandler. Copyright 2020, all rights reserved.
Pepper Shack. Avery Island, Louisiana, U.S. Photo art by Corey Sandler. Copyright 2020, all rights reserved.
Vamping. Acapulco, Mexico. Photo art by Corey Sandler. Copyright 2009, all rights reserved.

July 2020:
The Summer of Our Discontent

By Corey Sandler

When Shakespeare wrote of the “winter of our discontent” in Richard III, he was alluding to a hope for the end of unhappiness.

Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke with less sanguinity in 1963 referencing a “summer of legitimate discontent.”

Shakespeare lived through two outbreaks of the plague. And Dr. King dreamed hewing out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.

Does it sound like I have been spending too much time in quarantine?

Without a doubt.

By this time in 2020 we had been scheduled to be in South America, then Iceland and a circle of the British Isles, and then off to the Baltic.

Instead, we make early morning masked forays into nearly deserted Boston, and I conduct late-night photo sessions from our veranda–not on a ship but 200 feet up in the air in a waterfront tower.

We’re waiting for the best of times to return.

Here are some recent photos:

Fort Point Pop Art. Photo art by Corey Sandler, 2020. All rights reserved
Starry Night. Photo art by Corey Sandler, 2020. All rights reserved