2025-1 - Royal Clipper Caribbean Cruise - Feb-Mar, 2025

We took a cruise on the Star Clippers line’s “Royal Clipper” for a true tall ship sailing adventure! Star Clippers are proud to say that:

Royal Clipper was officially recognized by Guinness World Records in 2001 as the world’s largest square rigger in service.
www.starclippers.com/ca/our-fleet/tall-ships/introducing-royal-clipper

While we were excited to be recreating the golden age of sail aboard the Royal Clipper, it’s interesting to note that:

She’s not the “largest sailing ship ever built”; that title is still held by the Great Eastern (we think).
She’s pretty much the only vessel in the world square rigged on all five masts. The Golden Horizon, launched in 2000, is much bigger but is a barque (fore-and-aft rigged on the fifth mast).
And the Preussen, after which the Royal Clipper was modelled, was even larger than her imitator, but sank in 1910 neatly taking care of the “in service” qualifier.

And of course sailing purists would insist that the Royal Clipper isn’t a “true” sailing ship since she is engine assisted and only sails about 60-70% of the time. (On our cruise it was ~50%.) But we don’t care about all that; we just enjoyed the experience!

Courtesy of Air Canada, we started the trip with nearly a week in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. It was only supposed to be a day or two, but Air Canada tried to reschedule our flight for after the cruise departure date! So we extended our SVG stay to a full week. Other stops in the Caribbean included the countries of Barbados, St. Lucia, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, and St. Kitts and Nevis, and the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique which are overseas departments of France. Further details in our trip Posts below.

Read our Posts about this trip (sorted from newest to oldest):