Today was an exciting opportunity for the Bravo Team. We had two donors, Steve Oliver and John Anderson, and Len Maranan-Goldstein our Development Director join us as part the crew. We took this as an opportunity to share our skills!

After introducing ourselves and what we like about Bravo Team (being on the water, enjoying nature, learning skills and having fun), we took our guest team members through some skills we practice each day before we get on the long boats. Luca, Charlotte, Connor and Lia led us through weather observations and determined that the wind was under 18 knots as required by the Coast Guard, Gabe and Audrey lead us in a Shanty, and Roland, Kyle and Hunter showed us how to tie some knots we’d need on the boats. Then we headed down dockside.

When we got to Townshend, Luca, Gabe, Connor, and Roland taught us about parts of the boat and boating safety. Then Lia led our dockside training on rowing and rowing commands. The wind was strong enough that we needed to learn how to reef our sails so we did that dockside too. A harbor seal popped its head up along side Towshend in the middle of our training–we were so excited!

After some hardcore rowing we raised our reefed sails, enjoyed a well deserved snack, executed a controlled gybe, and enjoyed our moment of silence. Our journalist Luca broke the silence with a quote, “An animal lover gets treed by a bear and enjoys the view.” This made all of us animal lovers smile a bit.

We quickly and efficiently struck sail and headed into the harbor. Our Coxswain Kyle brought us into the dock with great skill and control in the Southerly tail wind. We furled our sails, moved our gear back and headed back to the classroom for some reflection.

Empathy was on our minds today. We took some time to write about empathy in our journals- what it means to us and how we show it in Bravo Team. Team members shared their thoughts- Empathy is watching others to see how they’re doing, it’s helping people when they need it and not if they don’t, it’s showing people a skill if they are struggling, it’s taking care of each other. We all agreed that we do this pretty well on Bravo Team.