The Ship’s Log

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 sailing. A few...

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 been...

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 started work...

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 morning trying, and failing, to...

We took advantage of today's warm(er) weather to get back outside, and spent the morning breaking ice off the ship's offshore lines and getting ready to pull our paint floats out of the water for the season. No matter what the weather is like on land, the water is...

Most of our winter maintenance work happens on the lower two floors of the museum:  in spar alley, the carpenter's workshop, and the rig shop. Things are always crowded, but once Niagara is downrigged and all of her supplies are stored inside for the winter, there's...

Like almost everyone in Erie, Niagara's winter maintenance crew spends a lot of time moving snow from one inconvenient place to another, only slightly less inconvenient, place. This morning, we cleared all of the weekend's snow and ice from around the foremast, which...

The Niagara and the Erie Maritime Museum get a little quieter in the winter, once the sailing season ends and the ship's seasonal crew scatters. The winter maintenance crew is small—a few people working in the rig shop, a few more doing carpentry—but there's never any...