New crew.

After the horrible moment of saying good bye to Matt at the Vancouver airport, two long flights, and a two hour shuttle bus ride, I arrived in Lunenburg in the early afternoon of Thursday May 1st. My crew mates John, and Kevin and I had all shared a shuttle bus ride with Greg from Kiwikaboodles, and arrived at the Picton Castle feeling excited and nervous, and speaking for myself, a little like a fish out of water, especially while watching all of the pro-crew confidently climbing aloft, painting, welding, and generally preparing the ship. We joined in as soon as we had settled and changed, and were in harnesses painting around the bottom outside of one of the decks before we knew it (There is an actual sailor term for the part of the ship that we were painting, but I suspect it will take me a bit of time to learn that, and the million other things there are to know).

More and more trainees have been arriving over the last couple of days, and the last of us will be arriving today in time for our first official all hands muster at 8:00am Monday. The amount of work that needs to be done before our departure date (presently set for May 17th) seems overwhelming, not to mention all of the training that is going to be starting, but the pro crew are all fantastic, and it's the most amazing thing to be part of a large group of people who are all working together to achieve a task. Yesterday we unloaded everything from the hold, and then did an inventory and loaded it all back in in a much more organized way. This was a huge job which involved all of us forming a massive chain of people to pass things from the bottom of the hold (which I would say is almost two stores deep) up to the upper lever of the hold, then out onto the deck midship, and then up onto the dock and into a logical place, and then repeating the whole process again in reverse. After our work day we had a gathering on our dock with the crew from the Bluenose II, and had a great time.

I am living in "the batcave" which is an all girls portion of the ship, with three room mates at the moment, all of whom seem really great. It was somewhat cold the first couple of days that I was here, but we have a space heater in the batcave and it stays really cozy. The sun is out now though and it's a beautiful day for a day off.

Alot more hard work to come in the next couple of weeks, and then, it's off to Ireland!!

I will post pictures when I can figure out how to.

Take care, and I'll blog again next week.
Nicki