If you are a boat looking for crew or crew looking for a boat to join this Blue Water Sailing Club cruise to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, consider jumping into this thread via replying. Identify yourself or boat, as the case may be, provide contact info and your age and experience (if you choose to) and what exactly you are looking for. For example, what leg(s)of the trip you want crew or want to crew. Boothbay to Shelburne? St Pierre to Maine or some other point along the way? Any of the listed towns on the itineraries are viable crew points - some more convenient than others.
Marcia and I have lined up a couple crew to help get us comfortably to Shelburne. We have one crew member to help with the next leg to the Halifax area and a different crew member to close it out on the final leg to Baddeck. These are friends of mine who have sailed Avocet numerous times and several of whom you may have met on the BWSC cruises. We need to be able to hoist sails, cook, navigate in fog, reprovision, deal with repairs, and have energy to really enjoy the laydays and group activities for a month.
As the Newfoundland piece of cruise has no overnight passage, I am reserving judgment on crew except on the return. I will have crew - 2 or possibly 3 crew - for the leg home from St Pierre. They likely fly in to St Pierre. If the southern coast of Newfoundland is something we decide we want crew to help us with (these 2025 decisions can be fluid at this point), then the crew points in Newfoundland are more limited. Most of that coastline has no road access. Port aux Basques is the obvious crew point. Some outports have local ferry service as indicated in the guidebooks; but that will likely entail a comfortable and inexpensive trip over from Sydney in a big ferry. Chase Leavitt in Portland Maine sells a good road map entitled "Atlantic Canada". It covers Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, P.E.I. and Newfoundland.
There is a member of BWSC who has expressed interest in joining parts of this cruise strictly by car. If so, that may open other options and capabilities for the boats.
With some planning, the limited use of crew will give your spouse/partner options - for example, some may choose to skip the overnighter to Shelburne and join up there. There is an adequate layover planned to do this. Some (most?) may choose to skip the return home from St Pierre. There is ample layover in St Pierre for this reason and for picking weather windows a la Chris Parker. If a boat is unexpectedly caught short for crew in St Pierre, then we can collectively make an effort to find crew.
At the crew meeting, to be scheduled, I can provide what I use for a "Captain's letter" for crew entering Canada and returning by boat. Though not every foreign place requires same, it is a good idea to have the letter just in case. It simply identifies the boat, its current location, the captain, that crew member joining the boat and the estimated time of next sailing departure and next port of call. My experience is that St Martin, for example, will ask arrivals in their airport for a crew letter - even if you are the Captain flying in on a return to your own boat.
There are numerous crew lists one can find online in many of the offshore races, crew list pages online with yacht clubs in the area, Points East Magazine published crew lists and Hank Schmitt's Offshore Passage Opportunities webpage which provides this service (for free to boat owners looking for crew). Hank is on standby with us. On one email from me in the Med in 2021, he got a crew for Avocet out of the Baltic in 24 hours. As it turned out, I had another friend who became available.