sail

1. verb, to work on a lake boat; 2. attributive ‘sailing’

1.
“Nobody wants to sail anymore. That’s a job to get anybody.”

“The young men, they either went sailing or they farmed.”

“My grandfather was a captain on the lakes, and he sailed.”

“So I went down, and he said ‘Come aboard. You got a job’. Yes, so that’s when I first started sailing.”

“Grandpa sailed on the sailing schooners.”

“He sailed out of Garden Island as horse-boy on one of these timber ships. Each ship kept a horse on it to pull the logs in and and so on. And that was his job, looking after the horse.”

“We were sort of water people. My father, his father was a captain. They lived in the Village here when he was a kid. And he was on the freighters, his father. And my father sailed on a schooner for a little while.”

“There was different young lads, eh, that come down and sailed … I had a couple of uncles that sailed. They both sailed.”

“The Welland Canal had only opened not very long when I started sailing.”

“I stayed home a year, then I went sailing.”

“They’d both go on the lakers, and they’d go sailing or whatever, on whatever was running.”

“You weren’t supposed to sail without you were in the union.”

“He got a job sailing down the Mississippi.”

“He asked Tom about going sailing with him, and he went sailing for one year. He was gone from, say, the first of May to the end of November and October, eh.”

“He was sailing that summer and coming through the locks … I don’t know what happened; nobody seems to know. I even heard one tale that him and another guy were throwing potatoes at one another, and he reached to get one and went overboard and was drowned.”

“Len, in those days, was sailing the lake ships, so he’d be gone from, I guess, April ‘til October or whatever, maybe longer.”

“Show them the ship I sailed on. The old Battleford, from Canada Steamship Lines. It was out of Montreal … There it is right there. I sailed on that ship … At least you seen the picture of the ship I sailed on anyway.”

2.
“Oh yeah, you haven’t talked about your sailing days.”

“… back then you had to have 36 months sailing time to write for a license.”