Transit from Beacon to West Point
This week onboard the sloop Clearwater was filled with lots of education programs, so I was pretty excited to have some groups join us onboard the “Sailing Classroom”. I made sure I was going to have some fish onboard so as to not disappoint the kids; I set out the eel trap on the starboard side of the boat while we were docked, with some chicken bones left over from dinner and my fingers crossed. Eels begin their lives in the ocean, but live in rivers like the Hudson most of their lives.
Eelfred the Eel
Early Monday morning I was up on deck brushing my teeth. In seeing the twine attached to the boat, I remembered that I had set out the eel trap, so I anxiously checked it with my toothbrush still in my mouth. As I brought it up, low and behold was a huge fat eel! I brought the trap up on deck, and as I was about to remove my toothbrush, the eel started to escape!
So, if you were to be up at the Beacon dock around 6:50AM this past Monday, you would have seen a Clearwater educator chasing down a loose eel on the deck with a toothbrush in her mouth and crew looking confused at what on earth I was doing. Eventually I was able to get the eel into the tank.
Jacinta “frying up” Trisket, the Hogchoker
The onboard volunteers went seining in the morning and caught 2 hogchokers, 2 white perch and 1 blue claw crab. We were able to test out our new hogchoker display/touch-pan with great success. Unfortunately it kind of looks like you are about to fry up a hogchoker. But we would never do that to our cute little hogchokers “Purple” and “Trisket”.
Midway through the week we had an all day transit from Beacon to West Point, the next day West Point to Alpine. We had good wind and sailed the majority of the way and were able to practice a “Man Overboard” drill, too. We learnt some more about sailing physics as well as doing some maintenance which the volunteers enthusiastically helped out on (and did a wonderful job too!).
The sloop Clearwater will begin its 45th year sailing the Hudson River in spring 2014, and every Clearwater sail is an ecological adventure and a voyage of discovery on an historic tall ship where kids and adults alike learn about the Hudson River, participate in the sailing the ship, and join in sing-a-longs with the crew. Since Clearwater’s launch in 1969, more than half a million people have experienced the Hudson River’s estuary ecosystem firsthand aboard the sloop.
Join us this coming spring onboard the sloop Clearwater! Learn about the Hudson River from the deck of a tall ship, and get to meet river life and see how cool the critters in the Hudson River really are. Click here to sign up today!
