Mystic, CT

Mystic and Mystic Seaport
As you know today we spent the day in Mystic home of Mystic Pizza. For those of you who do not remember this is the pizza parlor that the movie was made of by the same name.
Most of our day was taken up at the Mystic Nautical Museum and Shipyard. To say this is an awesome place is an understatement. There are literally 150 or so old ships of the fishing industry including an old three masted whaling ship and a three masted sailing training ship and many, many others.
The museum also consists of a town of the early 1800’s in a whaling town whose function was to build and supply ships going to sea for a very long time. The average whaling ship was gone for three years. During this time it would have to obtain about 2500 barrels of whaling oil. The average whale yielded about 30 barrels and a large sperm whale could be 100 barrels.
In addition to touring the ships we saw hands on exhibits of navigation, cooperage (barrel making), furling sails on the yardarm of the large ships, blacksmithing, rope making and hoop making for the hoops necessary for the sails going up the mast.
This is an active museum with a boat building yard in operation and all of the shops do work in the restoration and preservation of these old ships. The day we were there one ship was being readied to be lowered out of dry dock and refurbishing tomorrow and another was being readied to be lifted out of the water into dry dock to be refurbished. And these were both two and three masted square riggers.
There were also displays to show you how things were made and how the fish were caught and in the case of whales how the whale was rendered into whale oil. They also had the areas of the ships done up so you could see how the crew and the captain lived while on board. Believe you me this was a Spartan life.
The museum also takes young people as students to teach them to become sailors and merchant mariners. There are also programs for scouts and other younger students to spend the night aboard a real sailing vessel.
So our day was a full one and we learned a lot about the early life of the mariner.
1 Sailing into port
2 The Morgan the last of the square rigged whalers
3 Furling the sails
4 The cooper
5 A ship readied for lowering on the high tide