Here are some final photos from the last two days of this final trip. We enjoyed the Whaling Museum, sailing in the rain, field day, and the Schooner Olympics.

 

 

 

At the whaling museum, in front of the Lagoda

On the Lagoda

Taking the helm in the rain

Practicing knots in the rain

Still lookin' good in the rain

Lookout duty is a blast in the rain!

Taking shelter below during the rain to do some knot crafts

Field day brass polishing

Polish that bell!

Shine away!

Chillin' after field day.

Enjoying the clean boat after field day

Helping the team during schooner olympics

Do you know your station bill?

Which compass point?

Final score

Swim call reward!

By the sperm whale skeleton

CTY Whales and Estuaries July 25-August 3 (I was right the first time) post 4

Though there is a rainbow around the sun behind me, this will be a picture-less post. The internet connection is not strong enough here, anchored in a bay in sight of the Mt. Hope suspension bridge adjacent to Roger Williams University. Recognition of the same set the students off with exclamations of "The showers are so close!" and, "Let's just sail in now!". But I don't think they regret having spent the afternoon on the boat. It was full of activities that probably wouldn't have sounded fun to them ten days ago, but they had a blast.

Yesterday we were up early to have breakfast, carry out duty and dishwashing and make our way to the New Bedford Whaling Museum, twenty minutes before it opened. The museum is a testament to the town's illustrious past, as "the city that lit the world". Before petroleum, whale oil was the way to keep your home or business lit, burning without smoke and, if you were willing to shell out for sperm whale oil, with no odor. The boom of the industry provided the inspiration for Herman Melville's Moby Dick, allowed the town to become a hotbed of abolitionism, and made it one of the richest cities in America. The kids got to explore a half-sized replica of a whaling ship (built first, then the museum was built around it), see forty to sixty foot whale skeletons (one of a blue whale that was still dripping oil), and see a collection of scrimshaw that filled two rooms, to name just a few of the attractions.

After watching a movie about the history of whaling and New Bedford, we walked back to the Lady Maryland and set sail before sitting down to lunch. As we sailed up the Narragansett Bay, the weather took a slight turn for the worse. For a while we got to sail directly downwind, swinging the mainsail out to starboard and the foresail out to port, essentially turning the Lady into a square-rigger, but when the time came for more maneuvering, the captain turned on the engines and motored us up to a more sheltered anchorage. The cook prepared for us an ideal cold and rainy weather meal, cornbread muffins, rice, hot beans and okra, and spirits were soaring by the end of the meal.

Today we spent the morning in a "field day". Sounds like fun, right? Well I think it was, even though it was the crew's euphemism for cleaning the entire ship, bow to stern. Of course there was grumbling, but by the time we were polishing brass until it shined, the sun was shining, the kids were singing and everyone was pleased to be walking around a clean ship. Following some evaluations in the early afternoon, we had "Schooner Olympics", a competition of line identification, knot-tying, other kinds of quizzing and finally a buoyancy contest, were groups of two had four popsicle sticks, a rectangle of tin foil, and a foot or so of duct tape to create a vessel that would support the greatest number of small lead weights.

After a taco salad dinner, the lesson-reinforcement is continuing with a game of whales, estuaries, and nautical mechanics jeopardy. Everyone is looking forward to getting back to campus tomorrow, but at least one piped up during dinner, "this is sad it's our last meal on the boat". Expect to see some tanned and hardened but joyful and invigorated youths when you pick them up in two days. There should be a few more pictures up before then, when we're closer to land. Until then!

Polishing brass until we could see our reflections in it, and singing all the while.

CTY July 25-August 2 (why start publishing consistent dates now?) post 3

Boy, am I just happy as a clam after our dinner of pork stewed in chile verde sauce, yellow rice, black beans and tortillas. With the Lady Maryland docked in a harbor, the whole atmosphere is calm and contemplative, ideal for working on final projects (and, as it happened, a lesson on sail science).

All around are fishing boats, and had we sailed up eighty years ago there may have been just as many whaling boats. Tomorrow, we strike out into this historic city, to learn about its history of whaling, and more about whales themselves.

Yesterday, we spent the night anchored in the Elizabeth Islands, near Martha's Vineyard. We had a view of a beautiful, seemingly uninhabited Island off the starboard side of the ship, and beyond that, Martha's Vineyard itself, with a lighthouse whose sweeping beam could be seen by all of the anchor watches. Dead astern was the island of Cuttyhunk, with a quaint town nestled into its smooth hills. As any of you reading this may know, it was there that the students had a chance to call home, but only after taking a bracing dip in the ocean, the closest thing to a shower we're going to get. By 8:30, the sky was draped with low-hanging, blue-grey cumulus clouds, but in the west, off the port side of the ship, the clouds ended in a line, and beyond the line, a thin skyscape of different clouds lined in a color like the inside of a peach, if the pit were a fusion reactor. The sun dipped behind one cloud, bright yellow-orange, and reappeared below it, plum-red.

The students spent part of the evening carving scrimshaw, a pastime of the old whalers, who would carve patterns and pictures into whale ivory. We used tagua nuts, a common imitation ivory, and somewhat dulled needles, and filled the carved out lines with ink.

Today we made our easy way north, to the harbor where we are now situated. On the way, we let out the ship's trawl net and caught some downright exotic marine life. A baby shark, a large puffer fish, some weird looking shrimp (I'm blanking on the name), scallops, three flounders and a whelk were among the catch. The students sketched and wrote down numbers for each species, before we returned them all to the ocean. When your primary exposure to estuaries is the mere understanding that many of our largest cities on the east coast are situated along them, it is thrilling to discover the bio diversity that flourishes there, in spite of all the environmental challenges posed by humans.

That's all for tonight, we've got a big penultimate day of the trip tomorrow. With everyone well-accustomed to the routine of running the ship I think we will continue to enjoy every minute of it, if we have to haul the sails ten times.

Trip 4, Day 6, July 30

 We are finally in an area with great reception, so we have been able to upload a number of photos. Here are snapshots from the trip so far, in no particular order. We have been working hard, learning lots, and having fun. Enjoy the photos!

Dinner!

Dishes

Lowering sail

Taking a break from fish i.d.

Plankton!

Post-swim call huddle

Two humpbacks right by our boat!

Enjoying some hot chocolate on a rainy evening.

We saw humpback whales skim feeding right by our boat!

Demonstrating bubble net feeding!

Cleaning out the trawl net.

Chillin' out while standing by.

Flounder!

Post swim call

Baby shark!

Squid dissection night

Swim call!

CTY July 26-August 2 post 2

Greetings! It would be a fool's errand to attempt to recount the full extent of the past three days' adventures in the half an hour I have to update the blog, but here are some highlights, in the order that they occur to me:

We have just finished... well, you all at home will find out what activity we just finished in a few days, when you receive a very unique postcard. A hint: our writing instruments were primitive to say the least.

We took the day to sail out to Stellwagon Bank, the same locale of our hired whale-watching charter. When we had sailed out as far as we were intended, we had only seen one humpback spout. It was thrilling, to be sure; it was like seeing an elephant in the distance, from the top of your range rover on the Serengeti, rather than in a zoo. But it was only one. When we had sailed maybe a quarter of the way back the way we came, a shout rang out from the lookout on the bow: "There she blows!" (really, one of the crew pointed out, how many chances are you going to get in your life to shout "there she blows!" from the deck of a schooner). We made our way over. The rest could have been a fairy tale. We saw at least fifteen humpbacks, probably closer to twenty. One breached (threw its entire body out of the water, and fell back in with a terrific splash) twice in a row, maybe a hundred yards away. Another two swam around not more than fifteen yards from the boat, with their mouths half open, after blow bubbles to send schools of tiny fish in confusion closer to the surface. Lunch was delayed at least half an hour.

Yesterday we visited the historic Pilgrim monument in Provincetown (the original landing place of the pilgrims). We then headed to the Center for Coastal Studies for a guest lecture on whale entanglement, and what the center is doing to help the whales that do become entangled in fishing and lobstering gear. It was a bit depressing, but also uplifting: from the crude innovation of using the "gobbler guillotine" crossbow arrow to sever fishing lines entangling Northern Right Whales, to the lecturer's suggestion that our students may be among the generation of scientists and engineers to develop rope-less lobster trap systems.

The students at the top of the monument

Valuable educational tool: A life-sized inflatable Northern Right Whale. It took nearly the entire class to lie the length of it.

Time for the all-hands muster, and the reading of last night's collaborative story project from from the watch (the students come up for 70 minutes at a time to make sure the ship is sound and secure). Stay dry!

CTY Whales and Estuaries July 25-August 3

Welcome to the first installment of the Lady Maryland's trip 4 adventure blog, or, updates from CTY's second session Whales and Estuaries course, trip number 2. As the course's RA taps out this first update, the old gal is anchored in a refreshingly breezy harbor, and the last traces of daylight are fading from an enchantingly blue-grey sky. The students, having just finished their hot-coco, are finishing up the evening's lesson, which began with Nautical Terms 101, and is ending with I don't know what because I'm updating the blog. As a matter of course, it feels like we've been on this ship for at least a week, and I mean that in the best possible way.

The adventure began on a vessel quite unlike this two-masted "Pungy" schooner. The students and about half of the crew boarded a commercial whale-watching charter boat, and cruised at half the speed of sound out to Stellwagon bank, a popular haunt of the odontocetes ("toothed whales") and mysticetes ("mustachioed whales" i.e. baleen whales) that migrate through this area. As we approached the bank (which, I believe, is just as surprisingly large as every other geographic feature that was formed by glacier movement), we ecountered a large pod of Atlantic White-Sided Dolphins, that gamboled around and under our boat, and even hitched a ride in our wake, taking advantage of the current we created astern ("behind" in nautical terms). We were greeted at the Bank by a female Humpback whale named "Rapier", after the sword-like pattern on her tail flukes, and her calf, born earlier this year. As they surfaced together, the naturalist onboard informed us over the intercom that the calf was feeding. We encountered another mother-calf pair further out, before we set our course back for the port of Gloucester.

I've run out of time before the all-hands "muster". Expect updates tomorrow on our first days at sea and a visit to a port that was once a capital of the whaling industry. Until then, here's a preview:

Keep a weather-eye on the horizon!

Session 2 - Trip 1 (Day 8)

LOCATION: Nahant Bay
COMPLETED TASKS:

• Breakfast--French toast and the usual yogurt bar.
• Awning--Hands to hoist the awning to shield us from the rain.
• Field Day--All hands to deep-clean the entire boat; not a nook or cranny left unexplored
• Final Project--Students tie up loose ends of their articles for the Whale Weekly, the newspaper that will contain informative and entertaining contributions from all of the cadets.
• Certifications--Educator Beth takes each student aside to evaluate their scientific knowledge and  Science Officers, Able-Bodied Seamen, and Galley Mates. 

TASKS TO BE COMPLETED:

• Schooner Olympics--Name that line!  Tie that knot!  Identify that whale!
• Sail for land for the last time.
• And don't forget lunch and dinner

[Every day in their journals, students record the events of the day and reflect on their experiences using a "rose, bud, thorn" evaluation.  They enjoyed "roses", are excited about "buds", and are apprehensive about "thorns".]

ROSE:  Everyone is doing really well on their certifications.  All that hard work and enthusiasm for learning has obviously paid off, because the cadets are able to diagram a trawl net, explain water quality testing, and talk about whales with ease!

BUD: Daily showers. Sleep.  Clean clothes.  Need we say more?

THORN: The Schooner Olympics are the final test of nautical knowledge.  The cadets are nervous about this competitive display of boat comprehension, but the crew is confident they will succeed.

Session 2 - Trip 1 (Day 7)

WHALE!  That's right...we had our first sighting as we stood on the deck of none other than the Lady Maryland herself.  As we ventured into Stellwagen Bank in hopes of spotting some charismatic megafauna, a shipmate saw breaching whales in the distance.  But it didn't stop there!  Soon, we were in the presence of 5 other whales, all showing spectacular displays of whale behaviors that the cadets have been learning about--flipper and tail slapping, breaching, and spouting.  The climax of the day was seeing a humpback whale breach no more than 200 yards off the port side of our boat!  We also spotted other notable marine life on our trip along the bank, including a huge tuna and a couple gray seals.

With all the excitement, it a miracle that the cadets still managed to complete their on-watch (boat checks, navigation, lookout) and off-watch (lessons about whale relationships and taxonomy) activities.  After docking at Provincetown, we set foot on land for the first time since New Bedford.  We trekked through the charming streets of Provincetown to the Pilgrim monument, where we scaled the many steps to reach the top (we have the stickers to prove it!).  But wait...there's more!  Dinner on deck consisted of a delicious stir-fry, followed by yet another trip on land, this time to an ice cream shop.  Needless to say, it was a day enjoyed by all. 

We are sailing around Stellwagen again today and have high hopes for seeing more whales.  Wish us whale-watching luck!

 Racing to identify the sand dollars caught in the trawl net

 Standing by with fenders to protect the boat when we dock

 Whale, 2 points on the port bow!

Duty can wait for this special event

 Josh and Rong with the "Rong J", the winner of the buoyancy boat challenge

The starboard watch learning navigation with second mate Michelle

 Tying knots

Session 2 - Trip 1 (Day 4...pictures!)

Ahoy! 

First things first...pictures from our first three days on board the Lady Maryland:

 

Our educators, Beth and Bettina

 

Rong, Teigue, and Max doing a boat check during their watch

Stephanie and Colette (and Captain Sinker!) at the helm

 Erin and Hannah making a harpoon coil

 Josh takes the helm!

 The Port watch learning about lines from the second mate, Michelle

 Teigue and Rong work together to make the perfect harpoon coil

It's all hands on deck to trawl for marine life!

Day 4 was equally, if not more, fun-filled.  The day began with a trip to the New Bedford Whaling Museum, where the students got to experience what life was like for a greenhand (that's "new sailor" for you land folk) on a whaling ship.  They explored exhibits featuring scrimshaw (handiwork made from whale bones/baleen), whale skeletons, and ship models. 

Later on, after a good old American lunch of chili-dogs, the cadets learned more about how baleen and teeth determine how different whales eat.  They also collected plankton samples from the water and looked at them under a microscope...who knew plankton could be so awesome and diverse!  The day ended with a swim call and a delicious dinner made by Michael, our wonderful cook. 

We are now almost half-way done with our trip.  The days are going quickly, but we look forward to the time we have left.  Hopefully a whale-spotting and more swim calls are in our future...until next blog!

 

The whole gang poses with a blue whale skeleton at the New Bedford Whaling Museum

Swim call!  A favorite pre-dinner activity and a fun end to an eventful day :)