Couple buys local schooner to sail from Newfoundland to Australia
Rebecca Morgan of New Zealand and Richard Thornton of Australia pose with their newly purchased schooner Shenandoah II in St. John’s Monday. — Photo by Gary Hebbard/The Telegram
ALISHA MORRISSEY
The Telegram
Richard Thornton says a package vacation is not his style.
“The idea is that you want to get away from the time frame and go when the weather is right and go and enjoy sailing,” he says. “(With) a package deal, you got two hours to get there, you’ve got two hours to get back.”
The 34-year-old veteran sailor from Australia and his girlfriend, Rebecca Morgan, 25, of New Zealand, have docked the vessel they bought in Foxtrap in St. John’s. The couple is preparing for the journey of a lifetime — sailing from Newfoundland to Australia.
Despite the sun shining on the wet deck where Thornton is doing a bit of work to get the boat ready for the long trip, he and Morgan are wearing toques and warm thick jackets.
Thornton says his first impressions of St. John’s are that it’s, “very friendly, very cold.”
And although he hasn’t been in Newfoundland long, he’s already decided to take a page from this province’s history book, try to swap salt cod for Jamaican rum when he winds up at the islands.
Neither one has tried salt fish yet, but they are excited to do so.
In fact, according to Morgan, trying new food is what Thornton is most excited about on this trip.
“I love the different foods and different tastes that you get wherever you go,” Thornton says.
“And, you know, I’d just like to see places I haven’t been yet.”
Tiny may be too big a word to describe the belly of the schooner. With seating the whole way around the interior, a one-person bunk lines one side of the “living area” and a clothesline is strung across the ceiling above the solid wood captain’s table on the other side.
A stove the size of a milk crate is tucked in one corner with metal pots on top.
An empty flask of Lamb’s Rum lies inside the top pot — remnants of the night before when some locals stopped by to welcome the couple to St. John’s.
But Morgan says it’s not small. Compared to the last boat in which she sailed around Australia — an 18-footer that a person couldn’t stand up inside — she considers the Shenandoah II to be the lap of luxury.
“We lived on it (the 18-footer) for a little while and it was a lot squishier than this one, so we were like ‘Yes, we can stand up in it,’” she says.
The schooner’s hull is made of wood. It was built in Lunenburg, N.S., and designed to replicate the traditional Nova Scotia schooners.
Morgan, who is a nurse by trade, says the trip will likely take a number of years — with stops long and short in many ports — and while she’s got some jittery nerves, she’s really excited about it. This was not her first adventure; she’s been to the U.S., several of the Pacific isles, all over Australia, Japan, Canada, Singapore and Nepal.
“I’d just pop off, backpack in my hand, wound up at any train station. It’s like midnight, I don’t know where I am, have no map, have no bookings and just go and see what’s there.”
Thornton, too, has seen most of the Eastern world and the United States.
One “new thing” the couple has experienced while in Newfoundland was seeing ice in the water for the first time. The boat was trapped for a few days in Harbour Grace, all the while Thornton and Morgan marvelled at the ice.
The couple bought the schooner from David Murphy of Foxtrap, and asked that he, Roger Doyle and Reg Taylor, be thanked, not only for keeping the boat in such pristine condition, but because they “just really helped us a lot, and invited us for barbeques, and gave us a good deal on everything,” Thornton says.
To contact or sponsor the Shenandoah II, e-mail the couple at
bluehighwayskip@yahoo.com.au
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