On the eve of the anniversary of the loss of the original Pride of Baltimore, the keys on the keyboard feel more difficult to press. This week’s blog carries an added weight. We take a moment to remember the four crew members lost at sea on May 14, 1986, when Pride was tragically struck by a microburst squall while sailing home to Baltimore: Captain Armin Elsaesser, Vincent Lazzaro, Barry Duckworth, and Nina Schack.
Of all the blogs in this series, this has been the most difficult to write. How can a few short paragraphs truly capture the lives of those lost? They cannot. What follows is excerpted and summarized from Tom Waldron’s book, Pride of the Sea, which beautifully tells the stories of each of these individuals.
The events surrounding the loss of the ship will not be the focus of this 50 Years of Pride blog series. Instead, the focus here is on the shipmates lost and on taking a moment to remember them. For those interested in learning more about the tragedy of May 14, 1986, a reading list is included at the end of this blog.
During her nine years at sea, between her maiden voyage to Bermuda, New York, and Nova Scotia in 1977, and her final European voyage in 1986, Pride of Baltimore extended the hand of friendship to countless visitors. She visited ports along the Eastern Seaboard from Newfoundland to the Florida Keys, the Great Lakes, the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, and the West Coast of America as far north as British Columbia. On her final voyage, she visited European ports in the Irish Sea, the North Sea, the Baltic Sea, the English Channel, and the Mediterranean, the first Baltimore Clipper to be seen in those waters in 150 years. Altogether, she logged over 150,000 miles, equal to six times around the globe. She sailed farther in nine years than most sailing vessels travel in their lifetimes. No museum ship was Pride, but a true ambassador for Baltimore and Maryland.
Armin E. Elsaesser III, Captain
Armin was tall, standing over six feet, with blue eyes and blonde hair. He was the son of a prosperous Ohio family. When not in command, he enjoyed kayaking in the reservoirs outside of Baltimore and on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Armin was the third of five children and the oldest son. He grew up in Youngstown, Ohio. He had family ties to Salters Point, near New Bedford, Massachusetts. It was there that he learned to sail during the summers as a teenager. He attended Choate, an all-boys boarding school in Wallingford, Connecticut, and later attended the University of Pennsylvania.
He joined the Naval Reserve in 1967 and served in Bahrain at a remote Navy facility overseeing refueling operations. While tedious, it was more appealing than serving as an officer on a patrol boat in Vietnam. After being discharged, he moved to Mattapoisett, drove a 1965 Ford Mustang, and tried his hand at being a lobsterman and running the ferry out to Cuttyhunk Island. He later found work building wooden boats and delivering yachts up and down the East Coast. He was determined to make a living on the water and tried numerous maritime jobs in addition to sailing the East Coast and Caribbean. In the winter of 1978, he got his first major sailing job as mate on Westward, the educational sailing ship based on Cape Cod. He would take command of Pride of Baltimore for the first time in the spring of 1980.
He was most excited about the plan to sail Pride into the Mediterranean. In anticipation of the voyage to the Greek Islands, he listened to the book-on-tape version of Ulysses Found, a book written by a sailor who spent seven years on a small yacht retracing the travels of Ulysses using clues from the Odyssey.
Barry Duckworth
Described in Tom Waldron’s book as having the soul of an old salt, Barry grew up outside Washington, DC. His father introduced him to sailing, and it was his true love. As a teenager, he had a small wooden sailboat he painted red and yellow and named Ishtar. He would sail Ishtar on the Potomac after school. He and some friends designed and built a ten-ton staysail schooner out of cement, which was even covered by the local newspaper.
After high school, he found work on the schooner Defiance out of Connecticut, working his way up to captain. He did yacht deliveries on the East Coast and worked on Gazela in Philadelphia. There, he picked up carpentry skills and got to know future Pride shipmate Danny Krachuk. He got the job on Pride as carpenter/deckhand in 1985 after years of applying. He had a tattoo of a shooting star on his arm that he got at a Grateful Dead concert in Oakland, California, shortly before joining Pride while visiting his stepbrother, Moss Willow. His goal was to become a tall ship captain, and he figured his time on Pride was a stepping stone toward that goal. He was quoted as saying he was happiest while sailing.
Vincent C. “Vinny” Lazzaro
A commercial fisherman from Maine, Vinny thought he would give sailing a try when he joined the ship in Málaga as the ship’s engineer. He was intrigued by the idea of sailing the Mediterranean. His paternal grandfather had been the captain of a commercial sailing ship. He was looking forward to spending time in his grandfather’s home port of Genoa. With years of deep-sea fishing experience, he was ultimately looking forward to doing some good sailing, no matter where it would take him.
Vinny, or Vincent as his family called him, grew up in Connecticut with a brother and a sister. He loved chess, and after graduating from high school, he took a sailing course at Hurricane Island Outward Bound School in Maine and loved it. He attended the University of Rhode Island, where he completed a two-year commercial fisheries program, fishing on boats during his summers, and graduated in 1981. That summer, with the help of a friend, he got a job on a 108-foot scalloping boat out of Portland. After that, he followed his friend Craig to a series of boats fishing for pollock, haddock, and flounder. In March 1985, he and his shipmates were rescued from their seventy-five-foot fishing vessel Coastal I after the ship had to be abandoned. After that event, he returned to commercial fishing and then returned to work at Outward Bound on Hurricane Island. He would apply for a job on Pride for the second part of the European voyage.
Jennette F. “Nina” Schack
In the words of Tom Waldron, “No one hired to sail Pride over the years had dreamed about such an adventure as much as Nina Schack.” At thirteen years old, she would venture down to the Inner Harbor to watch Pride being built. She was even at the ship’s launch on May 1, 1977, her fourteenth birthday. She attended The Bryn Mawr School, and during her senior year, she had the opportunity to sail on Pride as a trainee. She spent a week sailing Pride on the Chesapeake Bay and up the Potomac. It was on that trip she truly fell in love with Pride.
Just before her junior year at Cornell, her mother, Roma, saw that Pride was hiring crew for the ship’s European tour. Nina jumped at the chance to apply, volunteering to take a semester off from school if needed. She studied Pride’s rig and practiced knots the entire winter before joining the ship. Sailing Pride was her dream, and she was determined to take on the challenge.
Today, Pride of Baltimore rests at the end of a goodwill journey that carried her to 125 cities around the world. Yet her most precious cargo was never the ship herself, but the spirit of the people who sent her forth and the countless people who welcomed her into their ports and communities. That spirit was not lost on May 14, 1986.
After the sinking, the eight surviving crew members spent four days and seven hours adrift at sea in a small life raft before being rescued at 2:30 a.m. on May 19 by the Norwegian freighter Toro. Today, Pride of Baltimore II sails as a memorial to those lost at sea and continues to represent the very best of Baltimore and Maryland wherever she goes, carrying forward the legacy of her predecessor and the spirit of all who sailed aboard her.
Recommended reading list.
Sailing with Pride, Greg Pease
Pride of the Sea, Tom Waldron
Pride of Baltimore: The Story of the Baltimore Clippers, Thomas C. Gillmer
Tall Ships Down, Dan Parrott
Bibliography:
Waldron, Tom. Pride of the Sea. Citadel Press, New York, NY, 2004.
Pease, Greg. Sailing with Pride. C. A. Baumgartner Publishing, Baltimore, MD, 1990.tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.
