Fleet Week’s Festival of Sail offers a peek at the LA Maritime Institute’s tall ships and programs

The nonprofit is the steward of three iconic tall ships — and plenty of hands-on programs to teach kids about sailing

Though Los Angeles Fleet Week is most well known for its showcase of modern military ships, the Festival of Sail — a display of vintage tall ships — offers event attendees a glimpse into the past.

But it also offers a glimpse into the many educational programs, community events, and more put on by the Los Angeles Maritime Institute, the nonprofit in charge of the Festival of Sail.

Los Angeles Fleet Week’s, a celebration of the country’s seafaring military branches kicked off its fourth day in earnest on Saturday, May 25 — with plenty of attendees.

By around noon, the line to enter Fleet Week’s main expo area curved around the waterfront — and tours of an aircraft carrier docked in the LA Harbor were cut off for the day.

Many folks, instead, made their way to Fleet Week’s Festival of Sail, which will offer attendees a chance to glimpse historic reenactments, cannon battles, sailing history lessons, ship tours, and more, through Memorial Day.

The Festival of Sail has been a part of Fleet Week for most of its nine-year history, according to LAMI’s director of sales and marketing, Alice Taylor.

“The vision was, here’s Fleet Week (which brings) a couple hundred thousand people (to the waterfront),” Taylor said Saturday. “We’re an integral part of the harbor and the port — why not show off our tall ships.”

And though the Festival of Sail usually captures somewhere around 10% of the larger Fleet Week crowd — an average of around 10,000 people every year, according to Taylor — the attendance is still a significant boost in exposure for the Los Angeles Maritime Institute’s offerings.

All of LAMI’s programming centers around its three signature tall ships: The Irving Johnson, the Exy Johnson, and the American Pride.

The Irving and Exy are 110-foot, traditional rigged replicas of merchant ships from the Age of Exploration, according to LAMI’s website, which were designed specially to address the educational needs of the organization’s  signature TopSail Youth Program.

Those two ships, according to LAMI, are Los Angeles’ official tall ships and maritime ambassadors — while the American Pride, which holds the same title for Long Beach and is the educational home base for LAMI’s Children’s Maritime Institute.

The TopSail Youth Program, which has been offered by LAMI since its inception just over three decades ago, is an interactive, at-sea educational program intended to teach kids everything there is to know about sailing.

The nonprofit also offers a TopSail Stem Program — which aims to build upon the eponymous sailing educational series — alongside various other programs intended on giving youth a hands-on experience in an ocean environment, support maritime workforce development, and address gender and racial disparities in the industry.

“The whole sailing world has got a very ‘yachtsman’ image,” Taylor said, “And a lot of the yacht clubs want people to learn how to sail and are trying to get more involvement.”

LAMI, for instance, is also connected with various women-focused sailing groups, does frequent sailing trips with the Girl Scouts, offers a bilingual “Explore the Coast” program, and more — in effort to bring people who have traditionally been excluded from sailing into the industry.

Youth who have participated in LAMI’s various programs, Taylor said, have often gone on to have careers in various STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) industries — ranging from ship captains to scientists.

“We consider it (a) transformative, life changing (experience,” Taylor said. “We know that this approach works, we see a change in these students with just one three-hour trip.”

The Festival of Sail, meanwhile, will continue to offer a glimpse at all of LAMI’s programs — and of course, the tall ships — throughout the course of Fleet Week, which runs through Memorial Day, Monday, May 27.

For more information about LAMI and its programs, visit lamitopsail.org.