Schooner Freedom Charters

We have a new web site, hurrah! It took a lot of research and man hours, but goodness was it worth it. We hope that you all enjoy it as much as we do. Designing a new web site may not be as glamorous as the actual sailing, but it all comes together gloriously to allow us to do what we love to do. Feel free to browse through the site and keep a weather eye on our blog – it will be updated daily (mostly) and should be a great way to keep in touch with everyone. Thanks for all of the positive feedback on Facebook – we couldn’t…

Hey guys, Kim here. With a little bit of rain washing out our earlier trip, it seemed like a good time to start the beginnings of our favorite nautical movies list! Captain Ron Any sailor knows you always start off with Captain Ron. Why? Because it’s Captain Ron…and the filming locales are all tropical, so we immediately feel tropical! “If anything’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen out there.” Deep Water Hands down, my favorite sailing documentary. Deep Water tells the true story of the 1969 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race. This sail race took competitors around the world, by way of the 3 capes, solo, non-stop, and unassisted. The Golden…

Despite the much told stories of pirating in St. Augustine, the town’s most prolific maritime venture was the legal trade of Florida Yellow Pine. I know, it doesn’t sound as exciting but Florida Yellow Pine was so desired, it was considered a huge bargaining chip between two world powers, England and Spain. Florida’s timber trade began in Pensacola, FL in 1743, with the first shipment containing pitch, turpentine, and 2 Florida yellow pine spars, each 84 ft. long, on a packet schooner bound for Havana. The first water-powered sawmill was built on Six Mile Creek in Jacksonville in 1819. Six Mile Creek is a shoot-off of the St. Johns River,…

“I must go down to the seas again” begins probably the most well know poem heralding tall ships, written in 1902 by John Masefield, an Englishman and Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1930 until his death in 1967. Masefield was sent to sea as a young boy by his aunt, to train him for a life on the sea and to break his much frowned-upon addiction to reading and writing. Once on board the HMS Conway, he found nothing but time and encouragement to read and write, being deeply inspired by the myriad of sailors lore, passed down to him from the old salts. His next commission was…