Westcoast Connections

Written by Summer Educator Keila Flores

Maine greeted the Westcoast Connection group with her skies full of rain, showering the students as they huddled together on the deck of the Equinox. The rocky figure of Hurricane Island came into view at last, and the group eagerly shuffled off of the boat and onto the float. Hurricane Island staff rushed to greet them, exchanging smiles and hellos. 

Unlike a lot of groups that come to Hurricane Island, this group had first met when they made their way from Boston to Rockland. Westcoast Connection is an organization that takes students on service trips where they are able to serve different communities while traveling and learning. The students cautiously mingled as they made their way onto land, almost as new to each as they were with this strange little island. After the students nested into their respective cabins, yurts, and bunks and devoured a filling meal created by our cook Phillip, they were whisked away on a sunset hike. The students were led up a winding path, scattered with waves of soft green moss, orange pine needles that quieted their footsteps, and lined with tall Spruce trees dripping with lichen. The trail ended at Sunset Rock, an outlook that is perfect for watching the sun dip behind the horizon. The group sat back and relaxed, taking in the sky together as it changed from blue, to shades of pink and orange.

The eight days that Westcoast spent on the island were full of activities, service projects, games, hikes, and random naps on warm rocks. If you were to be in the vicinity of the mess hall while students were congregating there, you were bound to hear laughter, the shuffling of playing cards, or the strum of a ukulele. Since the island provides us with such a beautiful home, we too must give back to her. Trails and campgrounds were cleared of sticks and twigs, the garden was weeded to perfection, marine debris was picked up off the shore, and some old tent platforms were demolished. Each day spent on Hurricane made the students braver. Students who had previously refused to swim were excited to do pier jumping. I witnessed one student ask if the kelp he found was edible. When he found out it was, he shoved it into his pocket and munched on it periodically throughout the rest of the lesson. The story goes that this same student later found a nice sized invasive green crab along the intertidal pools and took a nice bite out of it. 

As the students gathered on the dock of the Equinox to set off for their next adventure, their demeanors were night and day from when they had first arrived. The boat was full of smiles and conversation, some students already planning on their first reunion. The staff hummed a goodbye tune as the boat was untied and drove away from the island.

Small Scale Aquaculture Technology- Hands on Fabrication

Written by Silas Rogers, Facilities Manager at Hurricane Island Center for Science and Leadership

I had always been impressed with people who could weld- it was a medium that I had no experience with growing up. My dad worked as a carpenter in the ‘80s, so that was a skillset that I was familiar with. I knew my way around an angle grinder, but that’s only good at cutting metal apart. I have gained a few close fabricator friends over the years, which eventually led me to sign up for an adult-ed beginner stick welding class. This opened my eyes to a whole new medium for design and construction, and it just so happens that it dovetails nicely with the need to custom build tools for small-scale aquaculture. 

Our 24' Carolina Skiff harvesting kelp using the Electra-Dyne pot hauler and aluminum davit.

Hurricane Island Center for Science and Leadership leases about 3 acres of ocean, just north of the island. We are currently growing cultured sea scallops, and a few different varieties of marine algae (sugar kelp, skinny kelp) for research purposes. All of these species are set up to grow on what we call “long lines,” which are horizontal ropes set up parallel to each other, anchored on four corners by granite moorings. This method has worked well for us, and is common to kelp aquaculture in Maine. Our scallops are grown out to marketable size using a variety of methods, but one technique that has worked well for us are lantern nets, which are suspended mesh tubes with “layers” to separate the scallops in specific densities. This is fairly common with scallop growers in Maine, but servicing this type of heavy long line gear (often lines are as long as 600’, with nets spaced every 8-12’) safely and efficiently takes some special equipment. 

The Lindsey Marie working the long line in Stonington.

Marsden Brewer, a soft-spoken Stonington lobsterman who has diversified into scallop aquaculture, has one of the larger scallop farms in the state. We have partnered with Marsden, his son Bobby, and other local scallop growers for a research initiative over the last year, studying reproductive cycles of scallops. This meant we got to travel to Stonington by boat weekly to collect samples, and watch them work on the long line. Here’s a link to their website to see pictures of Marsden’s youthful glow and their farm. https://www.penbayfarmedscallops.com/

Maine Aquaculture Co-op's star wheel assembly. Note "guide bar" on the bottom.

Marsden started one of the first scallop farms in Maine, and had a significant hand in developing the customized gear to service lantern net long lines, in partnership with Maine SeaGrant’s Dana Morse. He fishes with a 38’ Atkinson Novi, the Lindsey Marie. The boat is set up with a hydraulic mast and boom that covers the entire deck space, which is great for moving gear around. But that’s only part of what makes the boat work well for scallops. He designed a custom rig to work the long lines, owned by the Maine Aquaculture Co-op, of which he is president. He calls it the star wheel rig, using ideas gleaned from observation of Japanese scallop aquaculture and Mediterranean mussel long line aquaculture. There is specialized hardware designed for these industries available, but the gear isn’t made locally, and it’s often for larger boats that are more purpose-built. Sometimes it’s just as hard to adapt existing equipment to what you need as it is to start from scratch. Marsden’s rig is built from a pot hauler backing plate and sheave that allows the boat to lock into the long line. He can then move along it without getting blown off, and raise the lantern nets to be cleaned, sorted, or harvested.. They say imitation is the greatest form of flattery, so that’s exactly what I set out to do. 

My take on the small scale star wheel started out with the rolling assembly. I chose to go to a local vendor, Marine Hydraulics of Rockland, for a 3” sealed bearing sheave typically used as a fairlead for pot haulers. This got mounted on a piece of 3/16” stainless plate. I used a piece of ⅜” stainless bar as a guide for the lantern nets, a key component to lead the vertical lantern net outboard of the sheave. I cut the “star” of the star wheel out of 3/16” stainless plate, and will weld that to the outboard face of the sheave. Lastly, I needed a way to mount the assembly to the boat, but still have it be easily removable. You can’t have gear hanging over the side as you come alongside other boats or a float, so I devised a system similar to a receiver hitch on a pickup truck. The star wheel assembly is mounted to a slip fit square tube, held in place with a stainless pin. Marsden’s rig is also easily removable- it needs to be that way to transition from scalloping to lobstering, which is often done in the same day.

3" Stainless steel fairlead roller without the star.

Star wheel mockup with wooden sheave and plywood star.

A quick note on fabrication, for those that are interested: After I completed my adult-ed course, I bought a 200amp TIG/Stick welder. It’s a portable inverter-based machine, and it’s more than capable of the majority of work I do. It cost about $1300, but is probably the best investment I have ever made. It makes me money and makes me happy. What more can you ask for? I TIG welded most of this gear together, but stick welding stainless steel is a viable option, and is actually quite forgiving and useful. A 1lb pack of stainless steel stick welding electrodes goes for about $20, and will last you quite a while. 

Using plywood to test different configurations.

I have yet to mock the whole rig up on the boat, which is stored on Vinalhaven for the winter, but I have done some quick-and-dirty bench tests to make sure my efforts might have a chance at working once they’re rigged on the boat. I had to experiment with the size and number of teeth on the “star,” and I used a wooden sheave and plywood stars to test different configurations. To explain the star part of the star wheel further, the gaps between the star “teeth” paired with the guide bar allows the vertically hanging lantern net to pass outboard of the sheave without having to lift it over manually. Without the star and guide bar, the lantern net would want to pass up over the sheave the same way as the long line. 

To come full circle on this whole thing, I’d like to thank everyone who has empowered me to learn to weld and encouraged me to develop it further and put it to good use in the real world application of custom aquaculture gear. I’d like to further encourage anyone and everyone not to be afraid of learning a new skill, maybe something you always thought of as out of reach, as it might set you on a new and exciting path as it has me. Let’s hope this works as well on the water as it does in the shop on land. Stay tuned for more home brewed solutions in the future!

Photos by Silas Rogers

For more information on adult classes offered locally, visit Midcoast School of Technology to learn more.

Supporting Justice, Equity, and Access

This post was published earlier this summer in June in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. Please read further to understand our response to this matter and how we are reaffirming our decision to remain fervently committed to providing justice, equity, and access to programs on Hurricane Island to all, especially Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. We appreciate any and all feedback and are encouraged by the momentum that is driving this movement.

Like many, the death of George Floyd has offered us an opportunity to reflect on why we, as individuals and as an organization, previously have failed to address the systematic racism that had led to his death and many other people of color at the hands of police. As an institution, we strive to provide safe and equitable access to science education, applied research and leadership development to everyone. We realize that our intent to create a welcoming and inclusive organization has not been enough to address the pervasive power differentials that contribute to racial injustice. We recognize the need to accelerate our actions to explore how our own implicit biases have affected our organization and the people we serve.

We reaffirm our dedication to facing and addressing the inequities that have been ingrained within our society and the privilege that has been afforded to us. Systemic change will take time. We are committed to action, knowing that our understanding and our impact will need to grow. We invite critique and we are committed to learning without demanding to be taught by others.

We are listening to our participants of color and partner schools/organizations to understand our current impact and how we can improve our daily interactions, our programs, and our policies and procedures. We are rewriting our programs to be equitable and expansive in content and in delivery. We are committed to increasing our scholarship fund to provide equitable access to Hurricane Island to everyone who is interested in learning with us. We promise to strengthen our efforts to recruit Black People, Indigenous People, and all People of Color to work at Hurricane Island and serve on its Board.

We will not be complacent. We will evolve.

For more information on some of the work that we are committed to doing, please see our Statement of Community.

Pomfret School

Written by Lilla Fortunoff

Ten students from Pomfret School arrived on Hurricane for a 10-day intensive Marine Biology course. At the start of the program some of the students and chaperones knew each other, but many of them did not, though you would never have known it by the end of the second day despite the fact that the students ranged in age from rising 9thgraders to a post-grad student. With every group that comes to the island for more than two days, we always ask the participants to create a set of community agreements to establish the ways they want to treat each other and to what behavior they will hold themselves accountable. The Pomfret students and teachers engaged enthusiastically with this foundational exercise. The Pomfret school is a private school in Connecticut and a large part of the student population lives on campus. Working to have a positive intentional community is taken seriously at Pomfret and it is inspiring to have people who deeply care and frequently think about community be a part of Hurricane Island’s intentional community. The students were continuously supportive and inclusive with each other. They acknowledged that they all had different backgrounds and comfort levels and pushed each other to try new things, explore, and learn. Much of the program was a combination of community/team building activities and island exploration. However, the students also conducted marine ecology research projects in the intertidal zone in the same vein as our summer High School Advanced Marine Biology course (which is 14 days!).  

On their first day on the island, I took the students to our intertidal zone near Two Bush Island, which is only an island when the tide is high; at low tide there is lots of exposed land and we can walk to the island! I asked them to simply explore and we found crabs under the rock weed, dog whelk eggs in the protected crevices in the rocks, and hermit crabs trying to pass for periwinkles. The next day, we spent time in our lab discussing possible topics for research projects based on what had piqued the students’ interests. We talked about how to turn our interests into questions, and how we would not be able to test every question we had with the limited time and resources of the program. The students had a universal interest in where crabs lived in the intertidal zone so we decided to collect data together in a trial run to familiarize ourselves with the different tools available for the research projects: quadrats, transects, and stadia rods. The students worked together to flip over rocks along transects at the low tide mark and in the middle of the intertidal zone (mid elevation) (we ran out of time for the high tide mark) and look for crabs, which they then identified by species and sex. After gaining experience, the students embarked on research projects individually and in pairs about algae biodiversity and marine snail distribution, just to name a few. The students worked extremely hard on their projects and fully packed their time on Hurricane with further reading and learning about many different facets of the ocean and marine ecology. These students inspired me with their balance of dedicated enthusiasm to science and to creating a welcoming and warm community. What a grand time!

To All Of My Fellow Engineers

Written by Sustainability Engineer, Maeve Carlson

Every night on Hurricane Island at 6:00PM there is a gathering of everyone on the island to experience the “dinner circle”. This allows visitors to get acquainted with the staff, share a moment and a quote together, and figure out what is for dinner. Some people are super into dinner circle, but I don’t identify as one of those people. I think it is nice, but I also could probably do without. One of the main reasons is that frequently staff share what their position is here on Hurricane, and for me, that proved to be fairly difficult to articulate. Usually I ended up with something along the lines of: 

“My name is Maeve & I am doing engineering stuff here”

Pretty vague, but close enough...

I came to Hurricane Island this summer as a volunteer with a degree in Civil & Environmental Engineering from the University of Maine. The goal was to geek out for two months over our infrastructure, including the photovoltaic system, grey water treatment, composting toilets, and especially our water system. I wanted to learn about the sustainable systems on the island because they are such unique examples of what I have studied for the past few years. However- because my position was so “made-up”, no one really knew what my role was within the organization. While I was figuring that out, I noticed was that no one really knew what being an engineer was either. I thought it was hilarious when I would get asked to do things that I had absolutely no business doing because of the stereotypes associated with my degree. 

“Can you fix the printer?” 

Probably not. 

I can’t blame others for not knowing what it is that engineers do; everyone at Hurricane always told me that the organization has never had an engineering position before. Sometimes they even claimed that they hadn’t been exposed to engineering, but whether or not they realize it, those statements are totally false. If I can say anything with confidence after my time here, it’s that 1) Hurricane Island already has extremely competent engineers employed on the staff and 2) engineering is at the core of a lot of the work being done here.  

After being in the STEM world for a while, I have decided that the difference between science and engineering is pretty simple. Science is the pursuit of knowledge to foster a deeper understanding, and engineering is the application of knowledge to actually do something.  Scientists create the theories & engineers apply them. In my mind, any project that is using science as a tool to solve a problem or improve a system should be considered engineering. Though the pillars of the Hurricane Island Foundation are Science, Education, and Leadership, I think the structural support that holds them together is engineering. I only had two months here, but you don’t even need that long to find examples:

• The next time you sit down to enjoy a meal from the galley, look down at your plate and see if you can recognize the decisions that went into providing you a nutritious meal while minimizing food waste and environmental impact. The gardens don’t magically produce the greens that we serve daily, but the effort it takes to cultivate them is justified by the understanding that by growing food here, we are taking steps to address the global issues surrounding agricultural engineering. 

• Ask yourself: Is our research team performing experiments and gathering information about scallop aquaculture so they can publish a paper and leave it at that? No. There is an application for the research being done; the end goal is to provide a framework for local fisherman who want to move towards a more diversified and sustainable fishery, and to help them set up their farms. 

• All the program participants that visit the island walk away with some sort of new skill or understanding, but the hope is that it doesn’t stop there. Listen to our educators as they inspire students to take home what they’ve learned and let it fuel a project that will improve their own community. The engineering process is all about identifying a problem and working towards a solution, and is what we are teaching here. 

• Follow the facilities team around for a day (or 20 minutes) & pay attention as they piece together solutions to all the challenges that pop up from having keep an “off the grid” island running. They don’t have the normal resources available to them out here, but it doesn’t really matter because the “wrong tool for the right job” mentality is just an example of how they engineer a solution based on what they’ve got. I know many engineers that don’t possess that ability, and don’t know many who can do it quite as well as those that I have met this summer. 

The transfer of scientific and technical knowledge within this community to encourage visitors, staff, and program participants to think critically about how to solve problems and improve the world shows how engineering is intertwined with so much of what we do here at Hurricane. It has been an absolute joy to be able to bring some engineering to this community, even though they’ve been incorporating it long before I arrived. 

So, to all of my fellow engineers:

Thank you for the work you do, and for a wonderful summer

-Maeve “Sustainability Engineer”

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

Compost, Curiosity, and Community

Written by educator, Lilla Fortunoff

High School Sustainability Leadership (HSSL) was two weeks this year! Hurricane Island welcomed three students for this final hurrah of the summer season and it didn’t take long until we on Hurricane could feel and hear the joy and curiosity with which the HSSL students would enrich our community for the rest of the program. With a smaller student to educator ratio, the five of us in the program (aka the Fantastic Five) were able to take time to follow tangents that interested us and delve into connections that were critical for grasping the many theoretical and practical concepts we threw at our students. 

After breakfast, our days always started by taking the kitchen waste from the prior 24 hours up the hill to the compost pile near our vegetable garden. While this may seem like a tedious chore, our students embraced it whole-heartedly. Through this process, they became intimately aware of the amount of food by-products (carrot tops, potato skins, etc.) and food waste (food that someone had not finished eating) that the community was producing. Every evening at dinner circle, the student who was our leader of the day would share the weight of the food waste the community had produced from the day before. It was awesome to have the students be the source of this information. They asked the community to make an effort to think carefully about the food you take to eat at every meal-would you actually be able to eat it all, or would it wind up in the buckets the HSSL students would carry up the hill? From this, Carolina and I were able to discuss strategies for communicating sustainable issues with our students - how do people react to being chastised? What happens when you can give folks constructive and practical tips for changing their behavior? We discussed how even though wasting food is a waste of money and the resources it took to grow and deliver that food, by being able to compost the food we can turn that organic matter into soil for our gardens! The idea that we actually want this soil to supplement our nutrient-poor, shallow soils on our granite island is one of many paradoxes that arise in the world of sustainable systems. For the students, this exercise was a way to test the waters and learn a lot along the way. 

One of the things I love most about working for HICSL is getting to live on Hurricane Island itself. We have so many technologies and pieces of infrastructure (like our compost!) that help us use resources efficiently and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels while still living in a comfortable way with many conveniences. Carolina and I teamed up with many of our fellow HICSL staff members to provide our students with the most thorough picture of what it takes to make this scientific and educational community happen. With Garden Manager Marguerite Wiser and Garden Apprentice Alex Berry, we harvested vegetables and herbs from our garden, which we then brought to the kitchen and made a salsa, kale chips, and sun tea under the guidance of Cook, Sophia Palange, and Kitchen Assistants, Ella MacVeagh and Josiah Hansen. After lobster fishing and visiting our scallop and kelp aquaculture site with Captain Saphrona Stetson, we talked extensively with Aquaculture Manager, Jessie Batchelder about sustainable practices and limitations in the scallop aquaculture industry. We worked with Sustainability Engineer, Maeve Carlson, to calculate (and then live-action test) the buoyancy of a floating platform that will be deployed at our aquaculture site to collect temperature data from the ocean surface to sea floor. Maeve taught us about the small computer that she will attach to the platform to collect the data from the temperature probes and the solar panel system that will power it all. Facilities Manager, Silas Rogers, gave us a behind-the-scenes tour of our water system, from pump in the Quarry pond to our constructed wetland, which filters the grey water from our sinks and showers and returns it to the island’s water table. The students helped Silas to change the filters at the pump house and the storage tanks and we learned about how our solar evacuated tube hot water heater works to allow us to take fossil fuel-free hot showers on sunny days!

Another one of my favorite parts of the program was a recurring activity we called Article Club (we even came up with a theme song for it!). We dedicated five 1-hour blocks throughout the program to reading an article together as a fantastic five and then discussing it. We read about a wide range of sustainability-related topics including water access, climate refugees, and an airline that is telling people to fly less. Each student led one of the article club sessions by posing questions to the group to encourage reading closely and then facilitating a reflective discussion. We engaged in extremely thoughtful conversations that were enriched by the students’ willingness to openly share their perspectives and make connections to their personal experiences and prior knowledge.

From the program’s start to finish, Carolina and I were inspired by the passion and energy of our students. It was a though-provoking, heart-warming delight.

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

WoW - What a Program

Written by educator, Isabelle Holt

It was my immense pleasure to be the educator on Women of Water (WoW) this year! An intrepid crew of ten high school aged women from up and down the east coast, a teaching assistant (Anna Bateman), and I embarked on a two week adventure that took us from exploring Hurricane Island to circumnavigating the Fox Island archipelago aboard the Boyd N. Sheppard.

Unlike most Hurricane open enrollment programs WoW is single gender - only female identifying students are accepted and enrolled. As a graduate of a women’s college I had been itching to lead an all-female trip for the past two years. I saw first hand during my undergraduate degree in Biology how transformational and empowering learning in a single gender environment - especially in fields such as STEM and nautical science that are traditionally dominated by men- can be for women. I saw this again a hundred fold in our WoW students. 

One of the highlights of our ten days on Hurricane Island was an after dinner speaker series, which we dubbed Women of Hurricane or WoH, where different female identifying members of our community came to talk to the students about their lives and paths to where they are today. Each speaker was asked to reflect on four questions: 1) Why do you do what you do? 2) How did you get here? 3) How do you think identifying as a woman has influenced your approach to your life and work?  And 4) What do you want to do when you grow up? By sharing our stories with the students, the students were able to resonate with us as well as feel more comfortable sharing their own thoughts and ambitions. 

Another exciting feature of this program was how often we were able to deploy our Sea Rocket, an underwater ocean exploration tool developed by HAWX Open Ocean. The Sea Rocket works via a fairly simple mechanism. You attach a weighted bag to the bottom of the rocket itself so that when the bag hits the bottom it is released and the rocket floats back up to the top of the water column where it can be manually retrieved. By mounting a gopro and flashlight on the bottom of the sea rocket you can see exactly what is happening on the ocean floor, what wildlife is present, and what substrate you are above. We were lucky enough to be able to use the Sea Rocket both while we were on Hurricane as well as while we were aboard the boat.  

Sailing on the Boyd N. Sheppard was truly a dream come true for me. Built in 1886 as an Oyster freighter, the Boyd N. Sheppard is a two masted, gaff rigged, schooner. While we were on the boat the students rotated through different watch stations: scullery, navigation, and deck watch. In the scullery, the students were helping our star chef, Adam, cook on an old fashioned wood fired cook stove, putting out three meals a day plus various baked treats that never ceased to amaze. The students on navigation watch were in charge of charting our course for the day using a chart of the Fox Islands and the process of dead reckoning, in which you determine your position using various fixed points such as marine navigational aids and your estimated speed over time to figure out where you are as well as where you are headed. The students on deck watch each day were in charge of actually sailing the boat: hauling anchor, setting sails, and managing all of our tacks and gybes. On our last day of sailing aboard the Boyd N. Sheppard the students ran the show completely as the educators and professional crew stepped back. Each student took the helm (steering wheel) of the boat for one nautical mile as they sailed us from Rockland back to North Haven and then back to Rockland again.

For me, WoW will remain a program to remember - the growth, determination, and openness shown by our wonderful group of students was extraordinary. Here’s to many more years of being WoWed by our wonderful young women!

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

Penobscot Bay Leadership Program

Written by Carolina Hutt-Sierra

PBLP! What a GROUP! The PBLP boys were a fantastic addition to the Hurricane community and while they were only on the island for four full days, their bright and hilarious presence was felt long after they sailed away. The Penobscot Bay Leadership Program is unique in its emphasis on leadership and taking responsibility for one’s actions as well as one’s role within a larger group. Lilla and I found ourselves continuously impressed as the days passed by and we were able to watch the boys interact with each other and the Hurricane community in a mature and kind manner that far surpassed their years. In particular, I loved watching the boys step into the position of “captain of the day.” In this role an individual boy was placed in charge of leading his “crew” each day (i.e. making sure things were never left behind, keeping the group on schedule, etc.). 

The group was full of energy and spirits remained high and cheerful over the course of the four days. From rock climbing around the old quarry walls and rowing (with our eyes closed!) around the Hurricane sound to waking up early each morning to run a mile and jump into the ocean, the days were packed with activity and energy. After the long days, the PBLP crew was able to slow it down each evening before dinner when the group headed out for an hour of “sit pot.” Hiking to a different location each day, we spent the hour spread out across the island’s coast, sitting in silence and reflecting on the day while admiring the water in front of us. This time for reflection would continue later in the night, as well, when we gathered for an evening meeting in which we would discuss the highs and lows of the day as well as areas in which we were proud of ourselves and each other as well as areas in which we hoped to improve. The group sailed out of Hurricane Monday morning and we already miss their laughter and pizazz here on the island! 

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize