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Admission charges are $7 for adults, $6 for seniors and $5 students 5-16.

The ships are open to the public from 9 a.m.-5 p.m.Sanger”s favorite places to sail are Lake Michigan and Vancouver. The ships stop in 35 cities over the course of 10 months. The Niña sails with up to six crew members the Pinta has up to eight. “It”s just been an amazing adventure,” said Richey, who has been aboard the boat for 12 days.Įrin Ptacek, who boarded The Niña in Knoxville, Tenn., the ships” last stop, is taking a break before resuming college. Presently, there is room for one person on each boat. The ships advertise for crew members each time they port. “We”re living in very tight space with total strangers.” Crew members are in close quarters and have two choices: Become part of the family or get off the boat at the next stop. With help from motors and other modern-day amenities like restrooms and small stoves, the ships docked at the marina are a bit ahead of Columbus” time. The original Santa Maria was too large, heavy and slow “for the business of discovery,” Columbus wrote in a journal entry after the ship sank on the first voyage, according to. But, brought in pieces and assembled in Columbus, Ohio, the boat is too large to navigate the waters, Friauf said. Replicas of the Santa Maria are in Corpus Christi, Texas, parked at a museum, and on the river in Columbus, Ohio. At the Columbus Marina, he said, the boats are probably on about 8 feet of water they need at least 7. The Santa Maria, Sanger explained, would be 95 feet in length and require 14 feet of water to float. Most children equate the vessel to a pirate ship, he said, and echoed Friauf in saying many people are surprised by how small the ships are.Īnother popular question: Where”s the Santa Maria? His father is one of the boat”s rotating captains, and Sanger “grew up on the water.” It is five years old.įirst Mate Stephen Sanger of the British Virgin Islands has been traveling with the Pinta for two years. The Pinta, at 85 feet long, is about 50-percent bigger than the original Pinta, to offer walk-aboard tours and an air-conditioned main cabin for private parties and charters. It was later donated to the Columbus Foundation. The Niña is the same size as Columbus” original Niña and utilizes a 450-pound anchor retrieved by divers off the coast of Africa. Friauf sailed the boat through the Panama Canal to Florida nearly six years ago and has been one of its rotating captains since. The Niña was built 19 years ago by the Columbus Foundation.

The two boats have been touring together since 2009, beginning in Honduras. “I imagined them to be a lot bigger,” admitted Shanon Richey, a crew member from Crossville, Ala.” In history books, they seem massive.” “They are a lot smaller than people realize,” he said of The Niña and Pinta, which also is at the marina and open for tours. “Most people are surprised in the size,” said Capt. Today, The Niña, a floating museum and “the world”s most authentic reproduction” of the ship, according to its captain, sits at the Columbus Marina, welcoming tourists through Sunday. And the last record of the ship is in 1501. Columbus” trips aboard the vessel began in 1492. With little space, food stored in the gunnels and livestock kept below, sailors slept on deck and got to know each other very well.Īt one point, after a violent storm took out one ship, the small Niña held 120 men on a voyage back to Spain. Christopher Columbus sailed 25,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean on trips to the New World on a 65-foot ship, accompanied by nearly 30 other sailors.

Columbus ships