{"id":9105,"date":"2025-08-27T17:49:48","date_gmt":"2025-08-27T20:49:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.qccrfm.com\/news\/?p=9105"},"modified":"2025-08-27T17:49:48","modified_gmt":"2025-08-27T20:49:48","slug":"brooklyn-marina-welcomes-bluenose-ii-crew-in-first-stop-in-southwest-n-s-tour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.qccrfm.com\/news\/2025\/08\/27\/brooklyn-marina-welcomes-bluenose-ii-crew-in-first-stop-in-southwest-n-s-tour\/","title":{"rendered":"Brooklyn Marina welcomes Bluenose II crew in first stop in southwest N.S. tour"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Two Bluenose deckhands meet. Kate Smith of Sydney, N.S., is currently part of the Bluenose II crew. Craig Harding of Liverpool was a deckhand on the ship in the 1960s. (Rick Conrad)<\/p><\/div>\n

The Brooklyn Marina rolled out the red carpet for Nova Scotia\u2019s sailing ambassador on Tuesday evening.<\/span><\/p>\n

A few dozen people turned out to meet the crew of Bluenose II at the small clubhouse as it visited the Liverpool area in its first stop on a tour of southwestern Nova Scotia.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Others drove down the small wharf in Brooklyn or towards the breakwater to get a look across Liverpool Bay to where the schooner was anchored near Port Mersey Commercial Park.<\/span><\/p>\n

Volunteers at the marina had food and drinks ready for the crew and fans of the Bluenose.<\/span><\/p>\n

Capt. Phil Watson was one of the dozen or so crewmembers who shuttled from the sailing icon to the marina.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe haven’t been here in a long time and we were developing a a cruise along Southwest Nova and so Liverpool it is. There’s great alumni support here and community support and the club has always been good to us so it’s pretty easy to put Liverpool on the list.. \u2026 It\u2019s good to come back to this side of the province again.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The tour of southwestern Nova Scotia was hatched after the Bluenose crew cancelled an early September trip to Gloucester, Mass. Instead, they said they\u2019d do what so many other Canadians are doing this year, stay closer to home and support local tourism.<\/span><\/p>\n

Kate Smith, a deckhand from Sydney, N.S., is spending her third summer on the Bluenose. It was her first visit to Liverpool.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI love it. It\u2019s great. People are sweet. It\u2019s super awesome,” she said of the Liverpool welcome. <\/span>\u201cWe really like going around this area and we figured we\u2019d go on a little staycation basically around the south coast.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Liverpool\u2019s Craig Harding sailed on the schooner as a 20-year-old from 1968 to 1969.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c<\/span>I’d been on fishing boats on draggers and so on but I’d never been on a sailboat until that year and I learned to sail on it,” he said. “I’ve been connected to the Bluenose ever since. Hard not to be. Really, really happy to see the support. It was beautiful to see her come in.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The last time the Bluenose II was in Liverpool was in 2021 when the ship celebrated 100 years of Bluenose history.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Jamie Frankel of Massachusetts just happened to be at the marina when he heard about the Bluenose\u2019s visit. He and some others arrived on his boat The Sea Quester a couple of days before to wait for a weather window to continue their journey through the Gulf of Maine.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNone of us knew she was going to be coming at the time, so this is an incredibly welcome surprise. … <\/span>As the sailing ambassador for Nova Scotia I think everyone loves her but in addition, she has beautiful lines as a ship and as a tall ship of that size I’d say that it’s always a wonderful event to be someplace where she comes in and it’s the splendor of old sailing ships and old-style sailing ships.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Capt. Watson says the Bluenose always draws a crowd.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s bringing a fishing schooner back to a fishing community. You know all these communities have shipbuilding, fishing heritage and these schooners, whether it was a fishing schooner or a cargo schooner, they all have that history there, so to be able to put a thing in place in the harbour where you can then talk about it and you can talk about, ‘oh those schooners used to be here all the time’ or ‘they used to build them over there’, it’s a chance for the community to talk about the history of their communities and share it with them themselves and hopefully they’ll come and share it with us as well.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The Bluenose II left Liverpool on Wednesday afternoon, sailing around Port Mouton to its next stops in Clarks Harbour, Yarmouth, Digby and Lower West Pubnico.<\/span><\/p>\n

Email: rickconradqccr@gmail.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Listen to the audio version of this story below<\/p>\nhttps:\/\/www.qccrfm.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/bluenosebrooklynmarinaaug2725.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Brooklyn Marina rolled out the red carpet for Nova Scotia\u2019s sailing ambassador on Tuesday evening. A few dozen people turned out to meet the crew of Bluenose II at the small clubhouse as it visited the Liverpool area in its first stop on a tour of southwestern Nova Scotia.\u00a0 Others drove down the small […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,5],"tags":[3364,3365,48,462,3367,3376,3366,3370,3377,3372,3378,3369,39,1475,3375,241,3374,3373,3368,1053,463,3371,714],"class_list":["post-9105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community-news","category-news-posts","tag-bluenose","tag-bluenose-ii","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-marina","tag-capt-phil-watson","tag-clarks-harbour","tag-craig-harding","tag-deckhand","tag-digby","tag-history","tag-jamie-frankel","tag-kate-smith","tag-liverpool","tag-liverpool-bay","tag-lower-west-pubnico","tag-nova-scotia","tag-nova-scotia-sailing-ambassador","tag-nova-scotia-sailing-heritage","tag-phil-watson","tag-port-mouton","tag-sailing","tag-schooner","tag-yarmouth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qccrfm.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qccrfm.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qccrfm.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qccrfm.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qccrfm.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9105"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.qccrfm.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9108,"href":"https:\/\/www.qccrfm.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9105\/revisions\/9108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qccrfm.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qccrfm.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qccrfm.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}