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Teaching on the Sea: The Nova Scotia Sea School
Tom Mason
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Teens get to learn about sailing, the sea and themselves at the Nova Scotia Sea School
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In 1994 an innovative American expatriate named Crane Stookey borrowed a wooden sailboat, gathered up a group of eager teenagers and set sail for a summer of adventure exploring the bays and islands around the mouth of Halifax Harbour. In an open navy whaler rigged for sail, the intrepid group spent their days cruising the coast and nights camped out on the islands. By the time the summer was over the Nova Scotia Sea School was born.
Today the Nova Scotia Sea School operates out of a small office on Gottingen Street in Halifax. From there, it directs programs that include sail training, boatbuilding, surfboard building and sea chest making classes. Throughout the winter months, the Sea School instructors organize outdoor education programs in places such as Halifax’s Citadel High School, at the George Dixon Center in the city’s north end and at Digby Regional High School, the East Coast Forensic Hospital and Addictions Services. From there, dozens of students, both teenagers and adults, learn skills that have become all but anachronistic in the modern world.
Since 1994 local teenagers, school groups and summer camp groups have built 15 boats including Nutshell Prams, Drascombe Luggers, a banks dory, two 16-foot Sea School-designed boats dubbed “Chebucto Sharpies.” They may be a long way from the great grand banker schooners that once slid down Lunenburg’s slipways, but they are learning and following the old-style building methods nevertheless.
At the heart of the Sea School are the summer sailing journeys. All summer trips start out at an old building on Lunenburg’s waterfront – a facility that was once used to refit the town’s fleet of fishing schooners. From that historic wharf, students as young as 11 set sail in Dorothea, an open spritsail ketch modeled after the Sable Island surf boats that were once used to ferry goods from freighters to that lonely Atlantic outpost. The young crew spends five, seven, eight, 10, even 21 days living on the 30-foot, cabinless boat. There are no amenities. At night a tarp stretched between the two masts becomes their shelter.
“They have to do everything for themselves,” says Amy Schwartz. “They navigate for themselves. They make dinner for themselves. And they have to decide where they want to go. It’s really back to the basics.”
Schwartz is the school’s executive director, a job she took over from Stookey about four years ago. Her own background includes experience as a kayaking guide on Nova Scotia’s eastern shore and a stint as a community development worker in South Africa. It was in Africa where she realized that there was a glaring omission on her resume: Despite her Nova Scotian upbringing and her years as a kayaker, she had never been in a sailboat. “I decided I wanted to sail across the Atlantic,” she recalls. She found a 43-foot catamaran that was looking for crew and set sail from Cape Town for Florida, with a stop on the isolated island of St. Helena. A broken refrigerator meant two more, unplanned emergency stops in Brazil and St. Lucia. It was hurricane season, and the catamaran made most of the voyage across Hurricane Alley in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. “We arrived in Florida about 12 hours after Katrina hit,” she says.
A few days after arriving back in Halifax, a friend invited Schwartz to get involved in the Nova Scotia Sea School. “I told her I just got off a boat and there is no way I’m getting on another one.” But she did anyway. Eventually she accepted the executive director’s job.
Today Schwartz oversees an organization that includes about 15 full and part time instructors. Not just teachers, the instructors act as lifeguards during the student voyages. “They don’t necessarily teach the way a teacher would,” says Schwartz. “They are there to make sure everyone stays safe. It’s mostly up the students to learn and do things for themselves. “
All trips include a GPS system, but it’s packed away with the flares, life jackets and other safety equipment on board. “If we have to take it out, it’s considered an incident,” says Schwartz.
At its heart, the Sea School is a water-based Outward Bound program with a Nova Scotia flavour, says Schwartz. It’s about leaving the comforts of home and the comfort zone behind on the wharf, about setting sail on an adventure that is no longer accessible to most urban young people. There is nothing digital or virtual about it.
The students, both boys and girls who range in age from 11 to 18, come mostly from Nova Scotia, but the Sea School also gets students from the rest of Canada, the US, Europe and Bermuda. To date, more than 1,000 students have gained seamanship and boatbuilding skills, developing self-sufficiency, leadership and courage in the process. The solo is the ultimate experience for students on the longer trips – an adventure where each student spends a night camping alone on an isolated island. “It’s a pretty powerful experience for young people,” says Schwartz.
In 2004 the Sea School launched a sister ship to Dorothea. Named the Elizabeth Hall, she was built on the Halifax waterfront through the efforts of more than 300 volunteers. Crane Stookey, who still sits on the school’s board of directors, has received numerous accolades for his work with young people, including the Queen’s Jubilee Medal in 2002. But the real rewards for Schwartz and everyone else involved comes when young people, who have been lulled in false feelings of inferiority, learn to thrive and grow in the school’s empowering environment.
“Nova Scotia has a culture of enjoying the outdoors, but we’ve never really translated that into an educational process,” says Schwartz. “A lot of students really need that. Whether they love school or have trouble with it, put them on a Sea School boat and they’re brilliant. We need more of this.”
You can help support one of 10 deserving Nova Scotian youth do a life-changing Sea School voyage this summer by donating to the 2010 bursary campaign. For more details and the program schedule go to www.seaschool.org or call 902-423-7284
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