It’s not a pleasure cruise, that’s for sure. “I can just imagine what it’s like on the ship.

“It was pretty exciting to see,” Sylvester said.

It took about 15 minutes for the motorized vessels to silently make their way from the bend in the river, under the Arrigoni Bridge, into Cromwell and up to Hartford Wednesday. “When you go down to the (Connecticut) shore, you’ll see cabin cruisers bigger than these things: there’s not much room,” Sylvester said. He and the crew will pass through many other states, including Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Tennessee and Arkansas, pulling into port in November for the winter in Muskogee, Oklahoma. “They have to use a little bit of imagination to get themselves into that era, but bring them down to the ships, now you’ve got all your senses firing because they come on board ship and get a better sense of their size,” Zenk said. “Take five groups of 25 or 30 middle school or high school kids in a social studies classroom for 45 minutes - where you’ve attempted to decorate walls according to whatever era you’re studying. “For me, given my background in sailing and history teaching, it’s a perfect combination of living history and sailing and far and away the best classroom I’ve ever had,” Zenk said. After Hartford, the flotilla will travel to Newport, Rhode Island, then Bridgeport, Connecticut. The Nina and Pinta tour 11 months of the year, making 30 to 40 stops along the way, he said. “They get the audible - where they’re hearing the wind in the flags and in the lines, hearing the water lapping on the hull - they’ve got an olfactory sense, where they’re able to get the scent of pine tar that these ships used to be covered in to waterproof and preserve the wood,” Zenk said.

Students, he said, “get a tactile sense feeling all the lines, the wood of the ship, and to a certain extent, the sails different pieces of equipment that we operate the ship with. But nothing, he said, compares to the immediate understanding of, and immersion in, history that happens when young people step aboard what Archaeology magazine called “the most historically correct Columbus replica ever built.” Zenk, a 64-year-old Hudson, Wisconsin, history teacher and senior deckhand, who goes by “DZ” on board ship, is just about at the halfway point, after putting the boats in March 1 at Perdido Key, Florida.ĭuring the school year, Zenk spends his time in the classroom, teaching teenagers about the world through hands-on projects. “It amazed me how tiny these were and you think of them sailing 400 years ago and not knowing what the heck you’re going to run into.” “I was impressed how small these vessels are and could not imagine that they crossed the ocean from Spain to the New World,” the city resident said. and waited until 11:30, when they came along. Sylvester learned about the event from the Whofish website, but couldn’t find information about when the pair would be sailing past Middletown, he said, so he went to the river around 8 a.m. This week, the vessels made their way up the Connecticut River from New Rochelle, New York, on their way to Mortensen Riverfront Plaza in Hartford, where they become docked floating museums through June 14.Īs the tiniest of flotillas made its way by Harborpark in Middletown, photographer Rich Sylvester stood along the boardwalk, taking in the magnificence of the Nina and Pinta - and capturing their voyage on camera.

Nina and pinta schedule 2019