The Tall Ships Visit Lunenburg – 2012

Today, I watched from my window as some of the tall ships battled their way into Lunenburg Harbour.

They were hardly visible though the rain and squall.

But they all made it safely into port.

The Pride of Baltimore is a frequent visitor to Lunenburg and I have already written a Blog about her.

 

https://queensincanada.wordpress.com/2011/06/12/pride-of-baltimore-arrives-in-lunenburg/

I love looking up into the rigging of these sailing ships. I have taken so many photos of the patterns of the ropes and masts, I feel I should use the patterns in a painting.

The Roseway was designed  to challenge the Bluenose in the international schooner races of the 1920s and ’30s and is an original ship, rather than a replica.

Unfortunately, the Blunose did not make it into the water as hoped. It looks like it will be next year before she sails.

I saw some of these ships at the Tall Ships Festival in Halifax in 2008.

 

https://queensincanada.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/tall-ships-festival-halifax/

The Tall ship Providence is a replica of America’s first warship.

The Lynx is a replica of it’s namesake that sailed during  the American War of 1812.

In contrast to these ships, the luxury motor yacht, Solaia, also arrived in Lunenburg last night.

I always enjoy the toing and froing around a working harbour.

Shipbuilding at Lunenburg, Nova Scotia

I saw this report in the local paper last fall.

Dawson Moreland & Associates Ltd., as the Lunenburg Schooner Company, will be laying the keels of two new “Lunenburg Schooners” in the finest Maritime traditions at The Dory Shop on the harbour shores of our famous seafaring town, Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Canada. We are starting off this exciting enterprise with the design and construction of two classic 48-foot, two-masted schooner yachts, for cruising, racing and ocean voyaging. “Fast and Able” schooners are our aim. An initiative to capture the imagination itself, this project is part of the restoration of The Dory Shop Boatyard as the wooden boat building and repair facility it has been for so long and is also a key component of the efforts to revitalize the Lunenburg Working Waterfront.

Starting this autumn, for the first time in many decades, townsfolk and visitors alike will once again witness wooden sailing vessels under construction along the water’s edge of Lunenburg  Harbour. For so many generations this was such a common sight that even today in the 21st century Lunenburg is known the world over for her fleets of white-winged sailing ships and abilities to put such vessels together.
The replicas of the Bounty, Bluenose, HMS Rose, the expedition vessel Wanderbird and the world voyaging sail training ship, the Barque Picton Castle, all sailing today, were crafted by the many area shipwrights, sailmakers, spar makers, block makers, slipways and blacksmiths. Together, they still make Lunenburg the place to build or refit a ship and launch a dream.

This was exciting news for us. Although coming from the East Coast of Scotland, the tradition of shipbuilding has almost died out and it is rare to see the building of any new boat.

We saw the keels when they had just been laid and last week-end went along to get some photos to show the progress.

The history of how they obtained the wood for these boats was also really interesting.

In the spring of 2009 while on the ship’s 18,000-mile Voyage of the Atlantic, the crew of the Picton Castle got permission from the Forestry Department of the Island of Grenada in the West Indies to go into the jungle with the famous Grenadian shipwright “Mr. Bones” and locate timbers for keels, stems and other components to build these schooners. Five days later the crew came out of the jungle with two 3,000- pound, 32’x12”x22” pieces of incredibly durable ‘Mountain Gormier’. These they loaded on the ship and sailed the 1,700 miles North to Lunenburg where they now lay at The Dory Shop with a growing pile of timbers waiting for keel laying day. Timber, carpenters, tools and other supplies are being gathered for the Autumn keel laying.

It will be exciting to watch the progress of these two schooners and I’m sure that the Launch will be a day of celebration for the town of Lunenburg.

A Sail on The Eastern Star at Lunenburg

Last Wednesday was my Birthday and I really wanted to do something different. I fancied going on the Bluenose, but it had headed to Gloucester, Massachusetts for a schooner festival. So we decided to have a sail on the Eastern Star, a 48 foot, wooden ketch which sails 3 times a day during the summer months.

The Eastern Star is below Cameron and Louise. The ship behind them is the Concordia, just preparing to take pupils of the School Afloat off for a 10 month trip.

There was a good breeze blowing, so there was no need for the engine, other than to leave and return to our berth. Jeff helped haul up the sail then admired his handywork.

We started off sitting on the seats but once we were out of the bay and she heeled over, it was easier to sit on the deck with our feet almost in the water.

We sailed past the lighthouse at Battery Point which has the fog horn that keeps us awake at night.

Our trip lasted about one and a half hours, before we returned to Lunenburg Harbour.

The Bluenose sails home to Lunenburg

Lunenburg is the home port of the Bluenose II.  She sailed up to Halifax for the Tall ships Festival and then returned to Lunenburg on the Tuesday morning. Here she is leaving Halifax on Monday after the Parade of Sail.

I then saw her passing our house early Tuesday morning and headed to the harbour for this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uggKqv12AV4

The Caledonia, another Lunenburg ship, actually returned on Monday evening as we sat on the deck at Cameron’s and I got this photo.

The Unicorn, Larinda, Concordia and PeersFancy  also all sailed in to Lunenburg to continue the festival. This is someone else’s photo of the Unicorn in Halifax.

The Unicorn was built  in 1947 from metal from old German submarines. It was first of all a Dutch motor fishing vessel, but  when its fishing days were over it was converted to a sailing ship and renamed the Unicorn.  It is now a sail training ship for women and is the only all female crewed Tall Ship.

The  Larinda is a replica of a 1767 schooner, built over a period of 26 years by Larry Mahan of Barnstable, Mass.  She was a labour of love, full of wood carvings and fancy and fun. Mahan sailed her in many Tall Ships events, where she was much admired. Then in 2003, having taken shelter in Halifax Harbour during Hurricane Juan, she was rammed by another ship during the storm and sank, right next to a sewerage outlet. It was a big mess, and Mahan despaired of ever being able to repair her.

The salvaged boat was bought by a Nova Scotia couple who live on St. Margaret’s Bay, and is being carefully restored.  Larinda didn’t actually make it to the Halifax Tall Ships event, and hasn’t been fully rigged yet. But she was towed to Lunenburg and rafted up alongside the schooner Unicorn, from whose deck we could admire her. Larinda is sporting a new colour scheme of black, white and bronze instead of green and off-white .  Her distinctive red battened junk sails were irreparably damaged, and her new sails will be white. The frog in the tricorner hat still graces her bow, and her brasswork is shiny.

It was nice to see this ship in Lunenburg and hopefully we’ll see her under sail in the not too distant future.