Tall Ships Races 2017

So yesterday I went to see the Tall Ships Races in the city of Turku, Finland. The Tall Ships Races is a big event that starts in one harbor and continues on to a few other during the event time. This year the races started in Halmstad, Sweden and from there the ships sailed away to Kotka, Finland. They arrived in Turku where I was going to go see them on the 20th of July and the event here ends today when the ships make their departure towards Klaipeda, Lithuania. The races will end in Szczecin, Poland.

This was the first time I attended but I knew that Turku makes a great city for this event since the tall ships can be brought all the way into the city centre. All the ships are anchored in a very small area on both sides of the Aura river that divides the city. This makes it very easy to walk around and see everything and there's a lot of food tents and beer boats nearby so everything's pretty much in the same place and in walking distance. This is the fifth time Turku will act as one of the host harbors for the Tall Ships Races and every year the event attracts approximately half a million visitors to Turku making it the largest public event held in Finland.

This first picture is from when I arrived at the event. There were so many people that taking photos of the ships was a little challenging but some of them turned out good!

These aren't even close to the biggest ones yet.

Here is one of the bigger ships:

The event was a lot bigger than I expected and I could've easily spent the whole weekend there. I walked through the whole event and even tried to get on one of the biggest ships because I saw there were other people on it but the sailor that was keeping guard said they weren't taking any more people in so I just had to continue looking from the outside instead. Here are a couple more photos of the biggest ships that were there.

After I had walked to the end I happened to run into a friend and he told me that he had been on the other side of the river to look at those ships but that it was mostly smaller ships there and more restaurants and bars. So I decided to not walk over there and instead only stayed on the side with the biggest ships. I started walking back towards the beginning and took one more photo from a different angle. Here it is:

So that was Tall Ships Races for this year for me but I will definitely be coming back next year. I had a blast there and some of those big ships are just so beautiful and majestic. See you next year