As punters come aboard the Leeuwin, bunks are assigned, luggage is stowed, and people begin to mill about, hands shaken.  People look at the ship, examine the myriad number of lines, the teal deck, the three towering masts, all to try to familiarize themselves with their home for the next two weeks.  The ship has three levels: the top deck where the majority of all the action with the rigging takes place, then there is the living quarters, saloon, galley, crew quarters, and navigation room below deck.  The third level is in at the bottom of the ship, and includes the engine room, fridges and freezers for food, dry storage, the human waste disposal/recycling system, water storage, and garbage storage.  For more detailed information, you can follow this link to the Leeuwin Foundation website: http://www.leeuwin.com/" title="http://www.leeuwin.com/" target="_blank"http://www.leeuwin.com/

For the most part, the punters were all adult--professionals of varying ages, and a few retirees--the small remainder were transients like myself, on the move, of no fixed address.  As it turned out, there was another canadian, Sebastien, a french canadian from montreal who was on a year exchange through one of the universities in Perth.  This trip was described in the Leeuwin brochure as the "Kimberley Ecodiscovery Trip I," and is known more colloquially as a cash-cow for the foundation.  The majority of the trips that the Leeuwin makes are for youths only, under the age of 25, emphasizing the elements of teamwork, leadership, and communication training.

In order to make the ship accesible to as many as possible, the trip price for youths is kept as reasonable as possible, with funding options available (such as the Captain's Fund for 'scholars'!) to assist as needed.  However, seeing that the foundation operates as a non-proft organization, it also needs to stay in the black--and thus the 'adult' trips--with adult prices to match.  Most of the punters on my trip had dished out AUS$2,400 for the trip, not including the cost of a flight to Broome from Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne... all over the country, as things turned out.  Knowing how much some had paid to take this trip, not including that they were taking time off work, made me that much more appreciative of the low price I'd paid for my ticket.

Initially, the trip did not start smoothly, although the delays were well handled and things progressed without a visible hitch.  In fact, the professionalism of the whole crew was very high and impressive--the delay served to show just how professional they really were.  What had happened was that the main generator had a broken part, so the backup generator was canabalized for the missing part--but this as a short term solution, as the ship would no longer have a spare generator.  Generators are used to power the ships--the communication equipment, the navigation computers, the electric cooking stoves, the fridges, the lights, the whole she-bang.  As things turned out, the fifty dollar part had to be ordered from Melbourne, shipped to Perth, then flown up to Broome.  What eventually happened was that the ship sailed as far up the coast from Broome as was deemed safe and the part was airlifted from Broome to a coal mine's private airstrip by a local Coastwatch plane.  All of this took place over a three day period, but ended delaying our departure from Broome by about two days.

In this period, the ship left Broome's p ort and sailed to the tip of Gantheaume Point, just on the outskirts of Broome.  Sail and line handling lessons were given, and once the use of harnesses was demonstrated, we spent some time learning how to climb the rigging.  The punters are divided into four watches called 'red watch,' and so forth, which then work the ship according to a four watch system.  The watch system works such that you usually have one or two watches during the daylight hours, lasting two hours long, and during this period your watch is responsible for the sailing of the ship, manning the helm, standing at the bow watch, trimming the sails, charting the course of the ship in the navigation room, etc.

Over night, there are two four hour watches; so the re is the 8pm to 12am, which is then followed by the long watch 12am to 4am, and from 4am to 6am, the return to the two hour watches.  Thus, if you have two day watches, you won't have a night watch--but 3/4 of the time you'll end up with a night watch, two of which will last four hours, in the dead of night, while most are sleeping.

The night watches are probably the best ones, as the night sky is bright with the stars, and as we were sailing off the essentially uninhabited Kimberley coastline, there was nothing to dim their light.  One feature of the southern hemisphere's sky is the greater number of visible stars--you can see the main body of the Milky Way, something you cannot from the northern, atleast not from Canada.  Although it is a long watch, which essentially boils down to standing around and trying to stay alert, there is a great quiet and gentle murmur of the ocean as the ship slides over it.  It is a great time for privacy and study, as only two are needed at the helm at any given time, another two up on the bow watch, and the rest patrolling the ship and checking the bilges for any excess water.  This leaves roughly half the watch to study navigation charts and the sailing books in the navigation room--there are also star measurements that are taken, weather readings, speed readings...  As a sail training ship, there are always answers to any questions, and much encouragement to learn as much as you are willing to handle.

The one downside of sailing in this area during July is that there is virtually no wind whatsoever, which is not a terrific thing for a sail training ship.  For the majority of the trip, we sailed under power, with some sails up, but not all, to help things along.  All the same, we did manage to set the sails a few times, and I managed to climb the rigging to my heart's content.  As things go, the ship is safety obsessed--to climb the rigging you must first get verbal permission from either your watch leader or a permanent crew member to make them aware of your intentions, then you must throw on your full harness, and then finally have a buddy pull and tug on the harness to ensure it has been securely fastened at all points and isn't too loose. 

While on watch, you must wear the lower part of the harness at all times--this is a climbing harness that fits over your clothes like a pair of skeleton shorts, only made of heavily woven nylon fitted with metal rings and a single quick release binder.  The top half of the harness is a shoulder strap sort of system that ties into the lower harness, securing your upper body, too, in the event of a fall.  The upper harness has a 'rocket pack' attached in the middle of your back--this pack hold a retractable nylon line with a quick release binder.  With two binders on your harness, you can then transfer from safety line to safety line without ever being unnatached--one is always hooked up.

This system, though, is a pain in the ass.  With two binders to manage, and a rule that you must always be attached to a safety line at all times, you find yourself sometimes dangling at a particularly awkward spot, holding yourself to the rigging with one hooked leg, another leg propped up against a nearby line, one arm crooked around a climbing bar while the other tries to deal with not one, but two binders that are stretched to the max in two opposite directions, one to the previous safety line, the other to the upcoming line.  The upper harnesses are a relatively new thing to the ship, added as part of a deal with their insurer who, as you can imagine, charges a fair mint for their services.  The other problem with the double harnesses is that it empowers people who would normally not feel comfortable to climb the rigging.  Like cats who climb to the top branch of the tallest tree, these people then have a great deal of trouble to climb back down.  Not that this sort of thing happened on our trip; but it had, on previous, and the permanent crew felt that the upper harnesses were to blame.