Video
Chuck Savoy Ernestina-Morrissey Interview
Transcript
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Speaker 1
My name is Chuck Savoy. I'm from a little steel town called Phoenixville, 30 miles west of Philadelphia, and I ended up here because I saw a job posting on the billet bank. I had known about Ernestina for a while. She's very well known, both in the industry and saw that they were hiring and applied. And here I am. I'm the bosun
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Speaker 1
I'm in charge of maintenance of things that are wood, rope, canvas, organizing work parties, making sure tasks get completed.
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Speaker 1
This is a contraction of the phrase boatswain. Sailors tend to be very economical with their words
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over the course of hundreds of years, they just get shorter and shorter and if you see them spelled, there's lots of apostrophes.
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Speaker 1
Part of it is that, part of it is when you try to also
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Speaker 1
a lot of times the vowels get swallowed by the distance and just the consonants get left.
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Speaker 1
currently, we just finished a several-year multi-million dollar restoration
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to get her back to probably the best, if not best, shape she's ever been in since she was launched probably and the current steward is the Massachusetts Maritime Academy.
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Speaker 1
through the academy, we'll be doing programming with cadets from the academy and then other kind of summer camps and stuff.
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Speaker 1
When the school year is out to do sail training and marine education work with her. The boat is 129 this year.
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Speaker 1
there's definitely a bit of a ship of Theseus kind of aspect to it in that there's one or two original pieces. The helm is believed to be original. The ship's wheel, parts of the anchor windlass, the metal castings in there.
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Speaker 1
But in terms of wood, very few pieces from, probably none from the 1890s, some from her Cape Verde packet days. But because one ship went into the shipyard and one ship left, it is considered to be a restoration and she's still the same boat or the way I like to think of it is
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Speaker 1
pieces might change but the spirit remains the same.
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Speaker 1
boats, I'm not if it's a certain tonnage for the requirement to be federally-registered but when boats are federally-registered, they're given a unique registration number that needs to be inscribed into the boat. It can't be painted on. It can't be stenciled. It has to be carved into the boat.
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Speaker 1
it's a non-removable mark.
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Speaker 1
that the numbers in that beam are Ernestina’s unique registration number.
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Speaker 1
We're about 150 feet and change overall.
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Speaker 1
12 feet is a pretty decent draft. The definition of a schooner,
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Speaker 1
a schooner is any vessel that has two or more masts, the second of which is as tall or taller than the first, and predominantly fore and aft-rigged, meaning the sails are center line to the vessel. If the second mast is shorter than the first, then you get into whether it's a catcher, a yawl. And then if the sails are rigged square, what's called square,
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Speaker 1
perpendicular to the boat.
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Speaker 1
Then you get into all sorts of different names depending on where they are and how many yards or square-rigged versus fore and aft. Schooners are really popular boats. They're easier to handle with less crew. You can sail closer to the wind with them. And especially for her original purpose of fishing, she would’ve gone up to the Grand Banks.
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Speaker 1
But schooners are engaged a lot in
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Speaker 1
coastal trade where there’s generally a consistent offshore or onshore breeze. Square-rig vessels tend to really shine in Transatlantic crossings where you've got the consistent trade winds. Schooners are, like I said, easier to handle with less people. You can use them in lighter winds. (Interviewer) And how many people does it take to sail Ernestina under sail?
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Speaker 1
did it with about a dozen on the way down to the Gulf. The caveat to that being we never set our full main sail. We were using our storm trisail, which is a reduced area sail
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Speaker 1
could do it with probably 14 or 15 people,
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Speaker 1
bare minimum, I would say, just on how big it is.
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We've got one of the largest traditionally rigged main sail in the country. It's about 2000ft², if I remember correctly. Someone told me it's the size of a basketball court. Yeah,
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Speaker 1
we did it with about a dozen. Not with the full main for the full main, I'd probably want like 20 people. 15, 20 people. Yeah.
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Speaker 1
to set it, we would definitely want all 15 or 20 of those people split between the two hours to raise it.
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But then once it's set,
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Speaker 1
you only need a watch worth of people.
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Speaker 1
3 or 4 people, maybe five in voyaging where you do a lot of times is when you leave.
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Speaker 1
a typical thing for us, kind of a pattern of work for us would be when we would leave a port to go to the next port, we'd have all hands.
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all 12 of us would be awake working the boat. We'd get off the dock, get out of whatever harbor we were just in, and then we would set the sails. And then generally, if the wind condition is favorable, if there is in a storm or other situation where we need to bring them in, the sails would stay up most of the time.
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Speaker 1
we have everyone awake to set them and then kind of stay up and whatever watches on would trim them, whether they needed to be let out more or sheeted in. But then if we needed to bring them in because, you know, like a storm was coming or something, we'd usually wait till there's a change in watch.
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Speaker 1
you got an extra set of people awake, or we would just wake everyone up to do sail handling. Ernestina actually has pretty decent visibility, all things considered. That being said, in the ocean
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Speaker 1
there's tons of space and you're going to see things long before you hit them
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Speaker 1
in a regular watch, you'd have one person on helm.
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Speaker 1
You have one person who's doing a boat check
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Speaker 1
once an hour underway, we walk through the whole boat. Look at all the bilges is to make sure they're not flooding faster than usual. There's no fire, that kind of thing. Everything's running normally, sounding normally helm person, bow check. And you have a forward lookout.
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Speaker 1
you have someone whose job it is to be either up in the bow or sometimes if the weather's bad, we stand forward, look out from back here.
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Speaker 1
But you do have someone whose job it is to be looking around, you know, seeing traffic as it kind of comes over the horizon, you know, making sure be like, hey, did you see that buoy over there?
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Speaker 1
You know, informing the watch officer that
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Speaker 1
oh, hey, like I just saw some lights over there. It might be a fishing boat or a tanker or what have you.
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Speaker 1
(Interviewer) At what point with someone go aloft?
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Speaker 1
Yeah. Schooners, there aren't a lot of reasons to go aloft unless you're actively fixing something or unless you're putting the boat together, taking it apart. At the beginning of the season, when we are rigging the boat, when we're doing uprig to leave on our trip, there would be 1 or 2 people up there for a few hours every day, hanging all the different blocks, running halyards or different lines up there.
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Speaker 1
But once everything is kind of set up, you know, I think probably the most common reason to go up there is like if a flag gets stuck,
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Speaker 1
like RPA or it is kind of funny right now, we might need to tighten that or adjust it. But for the most part, once the boat is rigged or down rigged,
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Speaker 1
we don't go out there frequently versus on a square rigged vessel.
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Speaker 1
You're up there all the time for sale, handling.
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Speaker 1
when we get our top masts up, we'll have top sails and people will need to go aloft to work with those. Which would be an added reason to go up there. But since we're in,
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Speaker 1
what's considered her traditional winter rig with no top masts, there isn't much day to day reason to be up there.
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Speaker 1
Traditionally for a Gloucester fishing schooner and most other fishing schooners,
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Speaker 1
to my knowledge, in the winter you would take your top masts down.
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Speaker 1
Kind of October through April or May, you would have just your lower masts, you'd have what's called your lower sails or our main for jumbo and jib. And then in the summer, because the weather is less intense, you put your top masts up, which let you fly,
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Speaker 1
you can do a little more canvas in light wind.
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Speaker 1
(Interviewer) Do you have any fun stories about taking the Ernestina out?
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Speaker 1
Yeah. I mean, she’s an amazing boat. She sails incredibly well. Part of the restoration was moving about 30,000 pounds of ballast from inside the vessel into the keel, which made her much more stiff.
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Speaker 1
she comes back up faster when she rolls. But that
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Speaker 1
means she carries her canvas.
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Speaker 1
Really well now.
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Speaker 1
She sails very sweetly. I guess a funny story is during our watch, during the watch that I was on and tending the boat for, one of the hinges came off the freezer and as the bosun, it's my job to kind of like do those repairs. And I was
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Speaker 1
oh, you know, like there's 30 minutes left in watch.
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Speaker 1
It's been a long day. I'll fix it first thing tomorrow when I get out for breakfast and the oncoming watch and some of our off going watch, we're like, all right, well, like, we're going to have ice cream. You know, they're all having this like ice cream party. And I am like, I don't want ice cream. I just want to go to sleep.
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Speaker 1
Go to sleep for 15, maybe 20 minutes. And I get like, Hey Chuck, Hey Chuck, we need you real quick. I wake up and they're like,
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Speaker 1
the other hinge came off the freezer door and we don't know what to do. And can you can you fix it, please? And I was like, yeah, guys. Like, I some like in my pajamas scrambling around for the screws.
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Speaker 1
I need to put the freezer door back together. Meanwhile, I've had no ice cream and everyone's just like sorry. And I'm like, yeah,
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Speaker 1
no ice cream. And so, yeah,
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Speaker 1
yeah, I mean, it's just a real privilege to be able to get to work on Ernestina specifically. But boats like this in general that has such a long and storied past.
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Speaker 1
I got started on a boat out of Philadelphia that's from 1901 and is a Portuguese cod fishing boat.
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Speaker 1
really a privilege to be able to have a job like this where I get to be outside, I get to work with my hands, and I get it, like, preserve these little pieces of history.
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Speaker 1
I mean, Ernestina is a National Historic Landmark, which is
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Speaker 1
amazing. I've worked on a few other boats that are National Registered Historic Places.
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Speaker 1
and I think it's it's really neat to see that and to be able to like, hold on to these little links to the past and kind of share them with the public in future generations.
Descriptive Transcript
The video begins with a black background. It then transitions to another black background with all text centered on the screen. The white text at the top reads: "Chuck Savoy" Below it, a green horizontal line divides the text. The bottom line reads: "Schooner Ernestina-Morrissey" in white. The title page text shrinks to a smaller size and moves to the top left corner. The black background remains, and white closed captioned text appears in the center of the screen, double-lined in a large font size.
Description
Join Chuck Savoy, bosun of the Schooner Ernestina-Morrissey, as he shares his journey from Phoenixville to working on this historic vessel. Chuck talks about the ship’s multi-million dollar restoration, the Massachusetts Maritime Academy's involvement, and the boat’s maintenance and sail training programs. Learn about the Ernestina's history, the significance of schooners, and hear a fun story about a late-night freezer repair during an ice cream party.
Duration
9 minutes, 40 seconds
Credit
NPS Video
Date Created
06/04/2024
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