Student sets sail on tall-ship adventure

I spent a recent weekend wallowing in maritime nostalgia near my home in Greenwich, East London, watching the annual parade of sail-driven tall ships as they prepared to race across the Atlantic to Canada to celebrate that country's 150th confederation anniversary.

Most of the ships, although based on designs that are more than 100 years old, are modern builds, but still rely on sails as their main means of propulsion. Many countries, including most European powers, maintain tall ships through various charity-based organizations known as sail training associations.

The aim, apart from maintaining a link with the maritime past before the days of container ships and massive cruise liners, is to encourage personal development and team-building among young people of all nationalities.

As I carried out research for this column, I stumbled across a reference to Chinese participation in the whole tall ships saga.

China doesn't have a formal sail training association, but step forward Chinese student June Xu, currently studying at the Edinburgh University in the United Kingdom for her PhD in - you've guessed it - tall ships sail training and youth cross-cultural development through international voyages.

She's a founder member of the China Sail Training Association, a UK-based organization originally set up to encourage Chinese-British and Chinese students studying in the UK to get involved with sail training.

Xu has impressive credentials. Part of the crew of the Dutch three-masted tall ship Guden Leeuw (Golden Lion) in 2013, she won the award for the best crew member from among 10,000 others that year.

She made a valid point when she told me she believed taking part as a crew member of a tall ship acted as a "social media detox" for a generation of young Chinese addicted to their smartphones.

Sail training, she argues, helps young people - not just Chinese - with personal development and building international friendships.

Xu is also hearing from friends back home that there is a groundswell of interest in creating a domestic sail training association.

There is already considerable interest in ocean-going sailing in China, mainly based around the port of Qingdao, Shandong province, where there is a significant marina.

The Tall Ships Race from Greenwich took place in the shadow of the restored China tea clipper Cutty Sark, which once plied between the UK and China carrying tea, spices and other commodities in the 19th century, an era considered the heyday of sail before the advent of steam propulsion.

Looking at her towering masts, you realize how tough and how dangerous it was for the dozens of crewmen to manhandle sail changes in all weathers.

Modern tall ships tend to have mechanized winches on deck for much of the hard work, although crew members still have to scale the rigging to set sail.

One striking sight at the parade was of a three-masted ship, passing through the Thames Flood Barrier, with her youthful crew lining the rigging and yardarms dozens of meters above water-level, waving as they went.

You can only wish them luck in their individual personal voyages.