Atlantic Cup Kids Archives

Over the next few weeks, the sun will reach the Tropic of Capricorn at 23.4 degrees south latitude, marking the winter solstice, after which the holidays will pass, and the New Year will be upon us. I’m sure many of you, including myself, will be glad to see the turbulence of 2020 fade in our wake and the promise of new opportunities rise on our bow.

Giving respect to the past and future, I’d like to share with you three happenings from this year. First, the Chicago Maritime Arts Center’s efforts, second, fun with 8th-grade students, and last, well…I’ll keep you in suspense.

The pandemic slowed all of us this year and forced us to pivot and find new directions. The Chicago Maritime Arts Center, where we introduce young people to building a boat they launch and learn to row, took on the pandemic challenges and continued to provide programs for underserved young people in greater Chicagoland. My hat’s off to Toby and Patrick for realizing that education need never stop. Together they developed a season of adjusted programs with fewer students and social distancing and successfully carried on throughout the summer reaching over fifty students and the accompanying adults. CMAC now looks excitedly forward to 2021.

One of the positives of CMAC is something none of us expected. Each program is chaperoned by coaches, adults and parents of the students. While our focus is teaching the students to use tools, row a boat, and navigate the new world of water and ecology, hidden in the success of CMAC is the adults’ enlightenment. We all know how hard it is to teach something you don’t know. Imagine leading young people to new opportunities without knowing these opportunities exist yourself. It never occurred to us that the adults were gaining a fresh perspective and understanding of the water along with the young rowers. The adults and young mariners, each in their own way, returned to their communities to lead and engage their peers with what they’d learned. While I believe we change the world by guiding young generations of people, we are never too old to learn.

I find the changes we accomplish through CMAC incredibly important. I hope you see that importance as well and will consider joining the effort. 2020 was tough on us. Covid restriction reduced our ability to hold our annual fundraiser. But 2021 promises to be better, and CMAC hopes to find a home base to significantly increase our ability to provide programs to the broader community. We all know a home base’s expense will require us to spend more time asking for donations. Simply put, we need a few angels to help us engage the youth of Chicagoland. Click here to find ways to join and options to help.

My second message involves the eighth-grade students and teacher, Tobi Guthrie, of LaPorte Middle School, LaPorte, IN.

As the students around the country ended their 2019/20 school year in remote learning, we also experienced our own disruptions and difficulties with making remote learning work for the students. Attendance for Zoom classes was down in every school. During our Atlantic Cup Education Program efforts, we worked hard to provide teachers an attractive option. Many of those teachers remarked that our presentations to their Zoom classrooms led to increased attendance.

Tobi Guthrie, a teacher at LaPorte Middle School in LaPorte, IN, and I have discussed using Spirit of a Dream, my book on the circumnavigation, for her reading classes. As the second wave of the pandemic quickly turned Indiana back to remote learning, Tobi asked her students if they’d like to read Spirit of a Dream and meet the author during the remote learning term. The answer was an overwhelming “yes.”

As fate would have it, Joe Janson at Seaworthy Publishing, returned to me eighteen books that had come back from bookstores for restocking. Tobi’s Novels Class has eighteen students. No more evident a reason was necessary, making the rest of the story obvious. Our first Zoom classroom meeting was a great success, confirmed by a ton of questions from the students. Next week, I will visit again via Zoom and update the reading, and I expect I will be once again bombarded with even more questions. What fun!

Spirit of a Dream is a thrilling read for adults–sailors or not. But when I wrote the book, I envisioned what Tobi Guthrie is doing; engaging young people in the story and to learn how we all fit in the planet’s ecosystem. It’s working. On my desk, I keep a note from a third-grade reader who stated, “Your book is the most engaging book I have ever started reading.” I hope we can all inspire young people this year; they need our help to continue to learn in this changing world.

Spirit of a Dream makes a wonderful gift for students, both young and old! And yup, that’s a blatant plug.

So, on to the last and most fun futuristic news.

During 2012 and ’13, one of Bodacious Dream’s most formidable competitors was Joe Harris on another Class40, Gryphon Solo II. As I wrote in Spirit of a Dream, Joe and I held, clearly in our souls, the same dream of sailing singlehanded around the world. Joe, on Gryphon Solo II, accomplished his dream the year after I did on Bodacious Dream. Fulfilling those dreams did little to satiate our desires to sail the oceans of this planet.

In 2019 as Joe was close to selling Gryphon Solo II, he learned of a new, doublehanded, circumnavigation race titled the Globe 40. Joe signed up, and this fall asked me if I’d join him as crew for some of the legs of the race. The rules provide for the changing of crew for different legs of the race.

In October, we held a crew practice in Portland, Maine, and since then, Joe, Rob Windsor, and the crew at Maine Yacht Center have been working hard to prepare GS II for the start scheduled for June 2021. Not unexpectedly, we learned this week, that the pandemic will delay the start of the race until 2022. But, the excitement remains high among those of us joining Joe for this adventure. The race will start in Tangiers, Morocco, and make stops at some fascinating ports of call around the world. The Mauritius Islands in the Indian Ocean, Auckland, NZ, Bora Bora, Ushuaia, Argentina, Recife, Bazile before finishing in Cascais, Portugal. Join the excitement. Click on both Joe’s Page and Globe 40 to receive the regular updates.

I hope we’ve all found a way to combat the pandemic and effect some small change in our personal worlds. Let’s continue to look closer to home to help inspire the young people of our communities. The pandemic doesn’t have to make you miserable; use it to inspire and affect change for the future.

Best to you all, and have an excellent 2021

– Dave and Franklin

Considering the strange circumstances of these past months instigating paradigm shifts in our lives, I hope all of you are doing well. Remarkably, I’ve not been on the water this summer other than to make repairs to a boat at the dock. Probably a first in fifty years. But that ok. It’s safe to say, I’ve had my fair share and plenty more of sailing.

Of the disruptions to our normal lives, the one that concerns me the most is young people and their opportunities to learn during this COVID era. As we ramped up the Atlantic Cup Kids Education Program earlier this year, COVID stepped in and knocked us back off our feet. While we bolstered our online learning presence, and I did virtual classroom visits, it became evident that educating kids would take more ingenuity from all of us. Through our efforts, we still interacted with over 2000 students on our educational portal and in our virtual classroom visits.

So, have you got a minute? I hope your answer is yes, and I hope too that you’ll be up for sharing some of your expertise with a kid.

I know that may sound daunting. I know you aren’t a teacher, but neither am I. Maybe, you don’t even know many kids, I’m single, and don’t have any children. I get that. But our distance from young people, doesn’t help them much, nor does it challenge us to step up and lead. One of the lessons I’ve learned from COVID is that we all have a responsibility to our community. In that sense, the mysterious “they” is actually us.

This week, I helped to lead a course on Ecology and Boating Skills for The Chicago Maritime Arts Center. CMAC works with young people from all diversities, inspiring them by building a small boat, learning to row it, gaining confidence, and developing an appreciation for learning and being within our natural world. Many of the students we work with know the Chicago River and Lake Michigan exist, but access for them is not easy.

So, what do we do at CMAC? Our mainstay course teaches students to build a small, ten-foot Bevin boat with their hands and minds. When the building is complete, they paint the boat, name it, launch it in the harbor and learn to row on the water. COVID is not making this easy, but we’ve pivoted, and this week, I’m one of three instructors leading our Boating Skills and Ecology course for fourteen students at the South Shore and Jackson Park Yacht Clubs. We use COVID Protocols to keep the kids outdoors and at a safe distance with masks where they will learn about boats, ropes and knots, water quality, the environment of the River and Lake Michigan and, learn to row one of the previously built boats.

It’s going to be a great time, and as you all know, I get personal joy and a real sense of fulfillment from working with young students. I can’t explain how inspired I feel when I see a reluctant student gain the confidence to proudly row across the harbor, venture out, and wondering what other opportunities they can grab from life.

I’m going to put out more blog posts as we go along, so you can live vicariously in this fun-filled, hands-on learning world. Of course, if you’d like to help us out, you’re welcome to contact us at CMAC

Otherwise, you’re on your own… to do what feels inspiring to you, by way of mentoring kids. With our schools stifled in providing ordinary education, much less experiential learning, it’s our chance to step in and help out.

So, if you’ve got that spare minute, spend it with a young person. Invite them to learn about your car, your garden, your tools, your kitchen, or give them a copy of your favorite book and help shape their lives. We all have to gravitate from infusion learning, where we put students in a room and infuse them with information to desired learning, where we create, stimulate, and fulfill a person’s desire to learn—teaching them the lifelong skills of learning to learn. Even if you don’t think you are showing that young person anything, know they are listening to your words, how you speak, how you react, how you solve problems, and how to act responsibly.