Tall Ship Belém - spring 2009 schedule
After 5 months in La Seyne sur Mer for her winter overhaul, Belém will set sail from Toulon on April 10th, on the first voyage of her summer season . For nearly two months, this tall ship will be taking trainees for a series of short trips along France’s Mediterranean coast between Toulon, Sète and Nice, stopping on April 24th and 25th at Marseille, where she will be open to public visits.
This year’s trainees will have a pleasant surprise in store - the battery, which is their main living space, has been renovated and made even more welcoming than it was in previous years.
On May 4th Belém will set sail for a totally new destination: Morocco. She will call first at Tangiers, then on to Rabat, where she will inaugurate the new quay of Rabat-Salé, part of the massive Bouregreg development that now joins the Moroccan capital to the sea town of Salé.
The development of the Bouregreg valley is expected to transform the face of Rabat by 2010. Construction began a year and a half ago and is making good progress. We are told that Rabat’s inhabitants impatiently await the project’s completion, which aims to place the capital among the world’s great international cities. According to local authorities, the goal is to make the city welcoming and attractive to tourists. Everyday life will improve through the creation of a tramway and a port, development of the mouth of the river, the construction of a tunnel, the creation of parks, pollution cleanup in the river and along the Atlantic coast, and environmental protection.
2009 will also be the occasion for the Belém and the Foundation to take a short trip down memory lane: 30 years ago exactly, the Caisses d’Epargne Group acquired the Belém from the Port of Venice authorities and she sailed back to France after an absence of over 65 years. We are promised several commemorations over the next few months, so why not bookmark New Freebooters or subscribe to my RSS feed by clicking on the orange button in the top right corner of this page.
Belém will welcome her new Captain, Commander Yann Cariou, who is expected to jon the ship towards the middle of May. If you speak a little French, how about signing up for a ’stage’ aboard Belém this summer?
If you’re not up to that, take a look anyway and find out whether she’ll be in a port near you.
Construction Vendee…
Bon article, nous le publions à l’attention de nos membres sur notre page Facebook et notre compte Twitter….
Merci. (Possibly originated as a spam posting, but the associated site is full of houses in Brittany ports, so could interest some New Freebooters visitors).