Spend your summer in the beautiful seaport of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Canada, sharpening and building your marine skills!
Bosun School was established and designed for people who already have some ship or boat experience and want to dive deeper into the skills you’ll need aboard a vessel. Whether you’ve sailed on a tall ship, a tug, a yacht, or any other kind of vessel, Bosun School will help you build your competence and confidence with lots of hands-on practice.
With the excellent summer weather, we’ll focus on small boat handling, which is an essential skill for any seafarer. Lunenburg Harbour is a great place to learn and practice in boats under sail, oar and motor. There’s an active boating community here, schooners everywhere, so you’ll get to know sailors of the local waters too. We have sloops, dories, dugouts, skiffs and a schooner at our disposal.
In this session, we’ll cover a wide variety of topics. We’ll learn knots, splices and whippings in rope. We’ll make rope seizings and learn to worm, parcel and serve. We’ll learn the right way to scrape, sand and paint, and how to manage a paint locker. We’ll splice wire. We’ll throw heaving lines and lead lines. We’ll learn about how to caulk decks and boats. We’ll handle heavy things and learn to work aloft securely and safely.
The way we’ll learn these things is through a combination of demonstrations and lectures, followed by lots of practice. Captain Moreland likes to say that practice makes permanent and that in order to truly understand how to do something, you have to do it a lot. Wax on, wax off.
This Bosun School session will run from Monday June 6 to Friday August 26, 2022. We can accommodate late arrivals or early departures to work around school schedules. The cost for this session is $6,000 Canadian dollars plus tax ($6,900 Canadian dollars total). Significant scholarship funding is available, please don’t let the cost hold you back.
Applications are now open. To apply, please send an email to [email protected] with your resume (including your sailing/boating experience) along with a cover letter that tells us more about you, your experience, and why you’d like to become a student at Bosun School.
