Great Yarmouth Maritime Festival - Ships & Boats, Music, Stalls, Food & Family Fun - 7th & 8th Sept. 2013

The 2013 Great Yarmouth Maritime Festival takes place on Saturday 7th & Sunday 8th September 2013. 

It's going to be a great weekend of Maritime Themed Fun along the length of Great Yarmouth's South Quay with Demonstrations of Maritime Crafts & Skills as well as lots of  Exhibitions, Demonstarations, Stalls & Ships.

The Maritime Festival is a riot of colour with tall ships and supply vessels flying colourful bunting from their masts. In 2013 we are proud to welcome the Dutch tall ship the Morgenster and also the steam tug boat Challenge. Find out more about the visiting tall ships and other outstanding displays of ship engineering at the 2013 Maritime Festival.

The Great Yarmouth Tourist Authority is delighted to announce that the two-masted brig, the Morgenster, a filly square rigged sailing ship will be attending this year’s Maritime Festival and offering on board visits and sailing trips for the duration of the festival.

The Morgenster’s beautiful rigging is based on American clippers from the 18th century. Heavy British warships were helpless against the more manoeuvrable and faster clippers from America.

The Morgenster was inaugurated in May 2008 and usually sails in Northern European waters, although also sails in warm winter regions across the world.

The Great Yarmouth Maritime Festival is organised by the Greater Yarmouth Tourist Authority. The Maritime Festival is one of the biggest events in Great Yarmouth's annual calendar where we celebrate Great Yarmouths maritime heritage and look to our maritime future on historic South Quay on the banks of the River Yare.

Greater Yarmouth Tourist Authority is also delighted that the Steam Tug Challenge is visiting to the Great Yarmouth Maritime Festival and will be open to go aboard.

The Challenge is a true national treasure and is proud to be registered in the National Historic Fleet.

Challenge was the last steam tug to have worked on the Thames, but is best known for the role she played in Operation Dynamo, the evacuating of troops from the shores of Dunkirk in 1940.

Great Yarmouth's very own Lydia Eva will once again be moored quayside for visitors to go aboard and experience the very latest in steam drifter technology from 1930. She has since been extensively restored and refurbished.

And as if that wasnt enough excitement, 3 different stages play host to a huge variety of live shanty music and sea shanty songs performed live by bands from all over the UK and Europe.

THREE SHIPS IN AN OLD GERMAN BRANDY BOTTLE

A Suffolk man has taken the traditional Ship in a Bottle to the next level. After 13 months, and countless hours of painstaking effort, and with huge amounts of skill and patience, Allan Stevens has unveiled his latest creation. The ex-seaman has made miniature models of three vessels steeped in local East Anglian history and recreated them in stunning detail - complete with tiny crew members - all inside an old brandy bottle !

The LT 472 Excelsior, the last surviving sailing smack from the Lowestoft fishing fleet, is featured alongside the LT412 Mincarlo - the town's only surviving sidewinder trawler - and the historic east coast herring drifter YH89 Lydia Eva.

In 2001 Mr Stevens completed an 18-month project to be hailed as the first person in the world to get a model ship - the LT 459 Nelson smack - into a yard of ale glass. But he hasn't stopped there, Mr Stevens has gone on to produce many other scale models of boats, creating one inside a light bulb and even building two ships inside a 1950s glass rolling pin. He is a member of the European Association of Ships in Bottles, and is devoted to his craft building up his skills over 38 years.

Mr Stevens began the preparation work for his latest creation by researching the length and dimensions of the three vessels and then using these to calculate the correct sizes for the scale models. The three models each include four crew members no larger than six-and-a-half millimetres. The Excelsior's 12ft by 5ft measurements scale down to about 13.5mm by 5.5mm.
He opted to place the vessels in an old German brandy bottle which he had owned for more than 30 years. "It doesn't have any flaws in it and I kept it all this time so I'd have something special to put in it" he said."The boats all go through the neck and had to go into three pieces to get them in - it is a nerve-racking job.
The Mincarlo went in first, then the Lydia Eva in second and the Excelsior third."

Mr Stevens, who is a member of the Lowestoft and East Suffolk Maritime Museum, said he had already had a lot of local interest in his latest creation, which includes a miniature version of John Wylson, founder and vice-president of the Excelsior Trust, on board the model of the sailing smack.
He estimates that he had now made at least 150 ship in a bottle.
"All my works give me a great deal of pleasure, but I am especially pleased with this latest one, given the local heritage," Mr Stevens said. "I worked on it more or less every day for 13 months."