Allison Park Photo
Sophia Messina maneuvered a sailboat by herself in the harbor Friday. Two weeks earlier, she would have been too scared.
Friday afternoon marked the end of the week for Sophia, who’s 11, and other students at the Schooner Camp, which is run by The New Haven Land Trust.
Since its inaugural launch last year, the revived program has doubled in size and allows curious students in the area to explore and learn about the fundamentals of sailing.
Though the program includes students as young as 4 years old, only those 9 and over went out on the water.
In addition to getting experience out on the water, the older students spent the other half of the day in the New Haven Land Trust Preserve following a science-based curriculum and learning about the Long Island Sound from land. The students 4 through 8 spent the day in the nearby park doing educational activities related to the curriculum.
New Haven Land Trust Executive Director Justin Elicker said the goal is to “get [students] out on the water.” In the last year, he said the camp became “very popular” and “very quickly expanded” to 350 total students this summer.
The program is also “empowering for young children,” said Elicker. He explained that within only one week, many students grow from an initial fear of water to maneuvering an entire sailboat in the middle of the New Haven Harbor.
With the support from several New Haven based organizations and the New Haven Board of Education, the Schooner Camp was able to raise $80,000, allowing 53 percent of the students to receive financial aid as well as free lunches (courtesy of the public schools) for the duration of the program.
While the students sailed in groups of three to four per boat, sailing instructors taught the students skills both in the water and in the classroom. In his second summer as an instructor, Noah Nyhart, 19,taught various topics ranging from parts of the boat, to how to steer in a straight line down the sound.
Nyhart taught the mechanics of sailing in the classroom first, so that the students could “mentally understand” the procedures before putting them into practice. By the end of the week, students knew how to prepare the boat for sailing and and the techniques to steer the boat around courses shaped in figure 8s and triangles. Even when a boat capsized from too sharp a turn, the group of students banded together and used the skills they acquired in the classroom to flip the boat back upright.
By the fourth day of camp, the students were already going out for longer sails that last about an hour. Nyhart said going on these long sails was the most fun part of the camp and that the students had “a blast sailing.”
“The instructors are really nice,” said Sophia Messina’s friend, Libby Grant.
Grant, 11, has had more experience sailing than Messina, But she didn’t know how to steer a sailboat by herself. But by the end of her time at the Schooner Camp, she said, she felt “definitely more comfortable in big boats.” The two made “a lot of friends” at the camp and learned important life lessons about teamwork and communication.
“I’m definitely going to want to sail more,” said Messina.