Another Small Craft Advisory kept us shore-side today.  With a mostly full crew, we headed outside for a trust-building and laughter-inducing game called Battle Bots.  The purpose of the game is for two teams to communicate with their robot (a blind-folded team member) to help them pick up a ball and hit the other robot.  The trick is that they were asked to use a different style of communication.  In the first round we asked teams to prepare and plan to use boat words in place of directives.  For example, ‘down’ could instead be ‘bilge.’  Another common boat word could be ‘port’ for ‘left’ and ‘starboard’ for right.

Battle Bots!

After three rounds, we had a circle to discuss what worked and didn’t work for each team.  Specificity, speaking loudly, being clear about what vocabulary words meant, and one voice were all feedback that was discussed as important to effective communication.  How does this tie in to longboating?  How will this connect to our next task of pumping out the boats?  Next, we headed down to the dock to climb aboard and take care of Longboats Bear and Townshend.  In our Battle Bot teams, we pumped out the bilges which were fairly full after the past week of weather.

Pumping bilges on Bear and Townshend

Our snack and Moment of Silence (MOS) were observed aboard Bear.  Time was flying by and we wanted to make sure to continue with the planning we started last week for the Environmental Project that we’ll do later this year.

Back in the classroom we broke into our teams of two and continued researching the topics identified as important to us.  Teams looked more closely at deforestation, plastics in the ocean, pollution, oil spills, and climate change.  Chrissy posed the questions:

Environmental Planning Brainstorm

On sticky notes, each team was then asked to answer the question, “What could Bravo Team do to help with this topic?”

Answers varied from biking and mass transportation instead of driving, to planting trees, to making our own cleaning products, to not using plastic straws.  The ban on plastic straws that Seattle is proposing also came up as inspiring and exciting!

Potential Action!

At the end of class we reflected on something we learned today and something we are thankful for.  Many thoughtful reflections were shared about what we learned: gum is made out of plastic, awareness of oil spill frequency in our Salish Sea, lots of endangered species from deforestation, to how cool it is that Seattle is considering banning plastic straws.  Thoughtful reflections on something we’re thankful for were: being able to go out on the water, being out of an artistic ‘deadlock’, my family, words & stories, nature, and being a part of this learning community.

We appreciate you following along with our team’s progress of learning and growing.  Happy Thanksgiving to you all!  (Captain SoSo)