Disaster at Sea

The picturesque town of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, is not a place you immediately associate with disaster.

Pretty, wood-framed houses, painted in pastel blue, green, and yellow, elegant churches and narrow, winding streets suggest an idyllic, tranquil past.

But take a stroll along the waterfront, past the sailing schooners and fishing boats, and you realize that this town's long association with ships and the sea has too often ended in tragedy.

At one end of the quay, there's a memorial in the shape of a compass rose, with black marble columns at each of the cardinal points.

On those columns, the names of 35 ships lost at sea and the names of hundreds of fishermen who went down with them.

The students who attended Class Afloat, a private school that combines sailing a tall ship and classes with travel to exotic places, would have seen that memorial every day as they walked back and forth to the school from their living quarters.

What they couldn't have known was how soon they would experience that fragility for themselves and how their destinies would become part of the town's history.

Lunenburg was the backdrop for this documentary about 48 students, eight teachers, and eight professional crew survived the capsizing and sinking of the tall ship, Concordia, 500 kilometres off the coast of Brazil on February 17, 2010.

W5: Disaster at Sea