Hump Day

We’re only halfway through our Tuesday-Saturday work week, but the rig shop crew and the carpentry team have already hit some major milestones—we’ve moved from sanding spars to varnishing them, and from deconstructing the foredeck to rebuilding it. The...

Meet the Crew: Amy!

Amy McDonagh is a carpenter’s apprentice and will be sailing with Niagara in the summer 2017 season. How did you find Niagara? I did a sailing program a few years ago with SEA (that’s the Sea Education Association) and that’s when I fell in love with...

Sandwich Saturday

For the last few days, we’ve had a straightforward schedule. We move snow in the morning before we start sanding spars. Sometime around lunch we move snow again, then troop back inside and sand more spars. And at the end of the workday, if the weather gods have...

Scarf Wars

Compared to yesterday’s blizzarding wind and snow, the weather this morning felt almost peaceful. It was cold and grey, but quiet. Only a few flakes of snow drifted down while we shoveled the remains of last night’s storm off the plaza. So when Adam and I...

Christmas Channel

By lunchtime on December 23rd—our last day of work before the holidays—I was convinced that I’d cursed us all. “Remember how I wrote that we’d get the channel off today?” I said to Amy, my fellow apprentice carpenter. We’d spend the...