There were so many businesses that
supported us. The families, in particular,
supported us when we were out there
by writing and we had letters from
right across Canada from schools,
from concerned citizens and we used
to keep a big bucket outside our sick bay.
Each ship has a mini hospital in case
something goes wrong and we would have
a whole bucket of these letters and the
sailors on their off time would take a
letter and write back and we tried to
write back to every and I think they
are going to try and re-institute that maybe
for this 25th Anniversary period that maybe
the schools that wrote to us 25 years ago
could have another look at it and
a number of us have volunteered to write
back and say ya it’s 25 years later,
here we go, so quite a remarkable story.
The businesses that supported us from
Halifax; Clearwater sent 3000 lobster,
live lobsters out for Christmas.
All three ships were at sea Christmas Day,
Christmas Eve we had lobster for
Christmas Eve dinner.
A number of our families were doing the
same thing back home but not knowing
that we had lobsters for Christmas Eve so
that’s a tradition in our house now.
Wacky Wheatley’s sent a Sony Walkman to
every sailor who was out there with
their name on it. Unbelievable,
I mean just the support was incredible.
So things like that just stick in your mind,
you know, so when you say wow,
we weren’t 11,000 miles away,
we were right alongside the jetty as
far as we were concerned.
Greco Pizza sent all the boxes out with all
of the material to make 3000 pizzas and
we joked because they were delivered in
longer than thirty minutes to the officers on
the bridge, the sailors in the engine room,
that they were free.
But they came with a box with a yellow ribbon
on it and farmer’s milk here at home
had yellow ribbons on their milk cans,
milk cartons until we got home.
Sobeys, Superstore, the local merchants
when we came back they held a
big party for us in the armoury here in
Halifax and they supplied all of the buffet and
we really felt good about coming home too.
You know the thousands of people that
lined the jetty, there were thousands of people
that lined the jetty when we came home and
that was quite something else too.
It was quite a deployment.