Week 1 - Piers Park

Welcome back!

     For my first week back with Save the Harbor, I worked at Piers Park. Piers Park is a public park in East Boston, and both a sailing camp and a "Harbor Explorers" camp program are offered there. The kids we work with are roughly 8 years old, and are part of the Harbor Explorers camp. A typical day working with the Harbor Explorers camp involves starting with some games to get the kids moving, moving down to the dock to fish for a while, break for lunch, re-group for lessons, and finally end the day with another bout of fishing.

My hand-drawn rendition of Boston Harbor. Islands are labelled.

     My favorite part of the day is definitely the lessons we teach after lunch. This week we taught about Boston Harbor, where each island was, and some history of the Harbor clean up. A mixture of delight and horror swept across our audience when the kids learned that their solid waste is processed and shipped to Florida to grow oranges, and eventually make its way back to the orange juice they have every morning (I pulled a trick from David Coffin's book and told the campers to thank their counselors for contributing to their orange juice).

Mystery egg, under some bait.

     On Tuesday (and this will happen every Tuesday with the group working at Piers Park) we worked with the kids at Courageous Sailing in Charlestown. We do similar activities with the campers at Courageous, but because they're older (more 11 and 12 years old rather than 6-8) and they run on a different schedule, we do different activities. While we were fishing with the campers at Courageous we caught our most interesting find of the week: an egg sac. We still don't know what kind of egg it was, but it was far more interesting than our usual haul of green crabs. Everything else we caught were green crabs, and strangely enough, we caught all but one crab on the same rod. The camper that fished with the mystic purple rod was continuously lucky!


     This first week of work was a blast. I loved seeing coworkers and Piers Park counselors that I remembered from last year, but it's equally as enjoyable meeting new peers and campers. This week, cut short by the holiday, was a good way to ease myself back into working for the summer and teaching kids.

Song of the Week: Stupid Deep by Jon Bellion

~Colin McRae