Gazela

Gazela, Philadelphia's own tall ship, returned home to Penn's Landing yesterday after a nine-week, 2,000-mile voyage. With Captain Anne Marie Cleaver, 28, of Glenolden - the first woman to take Gazela's helm - and a crew of 35 volunteers, the three-masted square-rigger visited 15 ports of call in Nova Scotia and the eastern United States as a goodwill ambassador for the city and the commonwealth.

Philadelphia's tall ship, Gazela, has set sail for Baltimore for a $1 million repair job that will allow her to participate in next year's parade of tall ships commemorating Christopher Columbus' voyage to America. The 108-year-old wooden barkentine left her berth at Penn's Landing last night, only hours after board members of the Philadelphia Ship Preservation Guild, Gazela's owners, put the finishing touches on a long-sought financial package. Money for the three-month rebuilding of the ship's stem and stern comes too late for Gazela to sail with a fleet of tall ships across the Atlantic from Spain next spring in a re-enactment of Columbus' 1492 voyage.

At 3:15 Monday afternoon, first mate Nick Horvath was settling onto his narrow bunk for a nap so he'd be awake to steer Philadelphia's tall ship Gazela into a safe anchorage sometime after midnight. Suddenly, a light west wind picked up strength and shifted out of the north, the direction that the 177-foot barkentine was headed as it sailed up the Chesapeake Bay from Norfolk, Va. The sails whipped around so violently that the ship began to rock side to side and lose forward motion.

The Gazela Philadelphia is under wraps for the winter. The city's official wooden ship got itself battened down with hundreds of yards of bright blue plastic last week. It's a new kind of preservative - and a new look - for a 104-year-old boat that has been the subject of preservationists' dreams and nightmares for many years. The Gazela is a familiar sight at Penn's Landing on the Delaware River. Before it arrived in Philadelphia in the early 1970s, it was a working codfisher in the North Atlantic.

Sitting sweaty and cross-legged below decks, Frank Hopkinson fiddles with a plumbing fixture that soon will be the latest improvement to a 103-year-old sailing ship. Meanwhile, above his head, 40 pairs of feet thump along old but sturdy pine planking as brass is polished, ropes tied, rigging tarred and fresh paint applied to the flesh and bones of the Gazela of Philadelphia, the city's own tall ship. They are never-ending tasks, these housekeeping chores, because a wooden square-rigger is never immune to water and rot. But these are chores performed by volunteers, from the heart, because the Gazela is a special ship about to embark on a long and special voyage.

AHOY, ARTS lovers. The tall ship Gazela is sounding its siren call. This week marks the first Mercantile Extravaganza aboard the Gazela, a 177-foot long, 110-year-old former Portuguese fishing vessel. The festival - 70 Rupees to Paradise Road - runs until Saturday and features concerts, yoga, an art gallery and Naughty Nautical Nite, featuring pirates, mermaids and Madonna covers. It's all designed to bring attention to the Gazela. "It's one of Philadelphia's best- kept secrets," said Patrick Flynn, superintendent of ships for the Philadelphia Ship Preservation Guild.

An unlikely survivor from the age of sail paraded its 19th-century timbers yesterday before the largest nautical audience in history. The Gazela of Philadelphia, the world's oldest active wooden square-rigger, joined 21 other tall ships in a majestic, awe-inspiring sail through a festive New York Harbor. Immaculate in his dress whites, Gazela captain Steve Masone led his all- volunteer crew as they joined a mighty display of naval vessels and the largest collection of pleasure boats ever gathered in one place.

Women are supposed to bring bad luck to ships, according to old sailing lore. Ha! Philadelphia's tall ship, the Gazela, has had nothing but smooth sailing since 28-year-old Ann Marie Cleaver was appointed captain three weeks ago. "There's something magical about this boat," Cleaver said yesterday after smoothly docking the 300-ton, 177-foot wooden barkentine at Penn's Landing. Cleaver, the first woman to captain the Gazela and one of the youngest to command such a vessel, appears to have brought luck to a craft that has had its share of mishaps in the 22 years she's called Philadelphia home.

In Ann Rice's novel, "Interview with the Vampire," the main character, Louis, has his first encounter with the vampire, Lestat, on a Louisiana plantation in 1791. But in the movie adaptation, starring pretty boy Tom Cruise as Lestat, the two are precariously balanced on a wooden yardarm, halfway up the 100-foot rigging of a great sailing ship. Hey, that's no Mississippi River prop! It's Philadelphia's own tall ship, Gazela. Missing from her regular winter berth at Penns Landing, Gazela is nowcq sailing back from New Orleans after 10 days of providing a nautical backdrop for a major motion picture about vampires.

Cross-country transport, last-minute financial wrangling, and a giant crane with a capacity of 90,000 pounds came together yesterday morning for overjoyed volunteers of the tall ship Gazela. The reason for their excitement? The "stick" had landed - all 8,000 pounds of it. An 80-foot-long, stripped Douglas fir tree from Oregon was maneuvered onto Pier 40. Sometime in the next few weeks, a craftsman will transform it into the mizzen lower mast of the Gazela, a 101-year-old barkentine sailing vessel.

Did pirates really shout "Arrrrgh!" from the rigging? Did they ever eat meatball sandwiches during lulls in the shooting? And one wonders: Were they all named Chris? Those are some of the questions that randomly emerged Sunday during a mock pirate skirmish on the Delaware River. The fight pitted Philadelphia's tall ship , Gazela, against a weird assortment of enemies on the water, with some landlubbers thrown in - tall ships Kalmar Nyckel from Delaware and the AJ Meerwald from New Jersey; the cruiser Olympia; battleship New Jersey; Summer Wind, a Chinese junk based in Philadelphia; and even Fort Mifflin, whose shooters were on the Penn's Landing pier.

AHOY, ARTS lovers. The tall ship Gazela is sounding its siren call. This week marks the first Mercantile Extravaganza aboard the Gazela, a 177-foot long, 110-year-old former Portuguese fishing vessel. The festival - 70 Rupees to Paradise Road - runs until Saturday and features concerts, yoga, an art gallery and Naughty Nautical Nite, featuring pirates, mermaids and Madonna covers. It's all designed to bring attention to the Gazela. "It's one of Philadelphia's best- kept secrets," said Patrick Flynn, superintendent of ships for the Philadelphia Ship Preservation Guild.

Some of sailing's charm is its unpredictability. The wind dies, or blows too hard, or in the wrong direction. You surrender to nature and drop anchor, or tack, or change plans. But a five-year diversion has been just too long for devotees of Philadelphia's resident tall ship, Gazela. Hindered by a damaged rudder, the 175-foot square-rigger - built for high seas in 1883 - has confined its sailing adventures to the protected waters of the Delaware River and Chesapeake Bay. On Sunday morning, however, the city's floating ambassador will hoist the sails on all three masts and, for the first time since 2005, leap into the waves of the blue Atlantic.

State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo holds no official position with the charity Citizens' Alliance for Better Neighorhoods. But the charity's spending has at times mirrored Fumo's personal and political interests. Consider its decisions to invest in a painting, in a bank, and in community endeavors outside the Philadelphia neighborhoods it was founded to help. To prosecutors, this sort of spending supports their argument that Fumo really controls Citizens' Alliance - something they may need to prove if they try to make a case that he was part of a conspiracy to defraud the charity.

Talk about disappointing. Vacation plans were set, bags were packed, and the food had been ordered. Then the day before Philadelphia's tall ship the Gazela was supposed to set sail for the Newport Wooden Boat Festival in Rhode Island, the trip was canceled when a problem with a rudder was discovered. "I was heartbroken, crestfallen and devastated," said Marcus Brandt, 49, of Allentown, who along with his 16-year-old son, was one of 30 volunteer crew members planning to make the two-week voyage to the premier event.

Gay Burgiel, 64, volunteer coordinator for the 103-year-old square-sailed ship, the Gazela, died of cancer Sunday at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. "Mother Gazela," as she was affectionately called by her crewmates, lived in Califon, N.J., but spent most of the last decade aboard the Gazela, whether berthed at Penn's Landing or at sea. Sailing was second nature to Mrs. Burgiel, who grew up in Mattapoisett, Mass., and "learned to row before she could walk," said her daughter, Heidi.

Cross-country transport, last-minute financial wrangling, and a giant crane with a capacity of 90,000 pounds came together yesterday morning for overjoyed volunteers of the tall ship Gazela. The reason for their excitement? The "stick" had landed - all 8,000 pounds of it. An 80-foot-long, stripped Douglas fir tree from Oregon was maneuvered onto Pier 40. Sometime in the next few weeks, a craftsman will transform it into the mizzen lower mast of the Gazela, a 101-year-old barkentine sailing vessel.

The Gazela, Philadelphia's tall ship, was to have been rechristened today. It was to have hoisted its 16 sails - for the first time since 2000 - to help the region celebrate the Fourth of July. But a long-overdue restoration of the 101-year-old boat is taking much more time and money than expected, casting a pall over its future. "Once we opened her up, we found that much more needed to be done," said Jim Forcellini of Feasterville, one of two skilled shipwrights coordinating the work of volunteers at South Philadelphia's Pier 40. Wood was rotting.

Faced with a deck of rotting planks and a shortage of wealthy benefactors, lovers of the Gazela have been struggling with a dilemma as challenging as unfriendly seas: How do you persuade funders to preserve Philadelphia's famed tall ship when, for most of its local dock life, it has done little more than look pretty and offer sailing tips to a privileged few? Yesterday, the volunteer deckhands and nonprofit board members who have kept the historic ship afloat for three decades announced a solution.