Normally the Alumni (when we say Alumni, we refer to those that attended the BROWN when she was a Maritime High School in NYC for about 36 years) organize about 2 work weekends a year which are typically in the spring and fall. With the painting of the ship and the looming trip to New York, there was (and still is) tons of work that needed to be done, so a work party weekend was organized and happened last weekend. About 8 people drove down from NY and one came from Ohio. They came down on Friday and worked hard from Friday through Sunday. On Saturday we had a good turnout, despite the heat, of regular Saturday crew members. We even had the painters come to do some final touching up, and there was an afternoon general meeting for members at 12:30pm.
They almost had to lube him up to get him into position to get this painting done!
The morning started out with bringing in the wire and putting out the mooring line on the stern of the ship. A bit of organization that needed to be done (a ship's version of putting everything back in place, where it belongs) thanks to the months of painting.
Engineers are always greasing things up..we had to stop them from greasing up that painter in the picture at the beginning of the blog! But that's how a basically 74 year old Liberty ship still operates...lots and lots of diligent maintenance.
Another thing that was done was to use the boom to bring on some equipment, which included a freezer and a new industrial grade 'sanitizer' which annoys certain long term crew who say "It's NOT a sanitizer, it's just a diswasher!!!" We have to get our jabs in when we can, lol. We also brought on plenty of dry stores for the trip north.
Due to the heat and the amount of work that crew were busy working on, the 9am general meeting was moved to 12:30pm. Lots of info about the New York trip was discussed, as well as our October cruise. The Captain also talked about the many things that needed to be done in the remaining 2 1/2 weeks before we hit the high seas. We ended the meeting with some 1000 Volunteer Hours awards to Chuck and Dan. Congrats guys!
Project Liberty Ship, Inc is a 501(c)3 non-profit, all volunteer organization engaged in the preservation and operation of the historic ship JOHN W. BROWN as a living memorial museum. Gifts to Project Liberty Ship are tax deductible.
