No Child Left Ashore

With the arrival of Mystic Whaler on the Central Coast, sailing opportunities for kids are on the upswing

The Mystic Whaler arrived in Channel Islands Harbor in January (see page 4) where as Mystic Cruzar she will serve as the flagship of Roger and Sarah Chrisman’s newly-formed Central Coast Ocean Adventures. We recently spoke to Greg Gorga, Executive Director of the Santa Barbara Maritime Museum, which along with the Channel Islands Maritime Museum will be organizing school programs on the Cruzar as soon as this fall.

Marlinspike: What kind of impact can Mystic Cruzar have on your programming in Santa Barbara?

Greg Gorga: Nothing’s set in stone yet, but we hope to continue with our “Before the Mast” program based on Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast. We had been working with the Ocean Institute for about 20 years on that program. It’s been a very, very successful program here in Santa Barbara. We’ve put 10,000 kids on board over 20 years, county-wide. For many of them, it’s their very first night on a tall ship. For some, it’s their first night away from home. And it’s just been an amazingly successful program here.

MS: What happens during those programs? How long are they? What are the ages?

GG: California fourth graders are studying their state history. Dana’s book really pertinent to Santa Barbara because Dana’s very first stop was here, before they were supposed to check into Monterey. He talks about some traditions that are still going on here. We have what’s called Old Spanish Days, where everybody gets egg stuffed with confetti and smacks people over the head with them. Confetti all over State Street. Dana wrote about that back in the 1830s, at a wedding that he attended. So that tradition actually is still going on. I think it’s the first written record of that tradition.

The kids show up here at two o’clock on a weekday afternoon. They do a tour of the Maritime Museum with our docents. Specifically, they cover the Richard Henry Dana exhibit and talk about that, but see other parts of the museum as well. Then they get a 15-minute break on our front patio, after which the crew shows up — usually four characters from that book. The captain, who’s kind of aloof; the first mate, who’s very hard on the kids; second mate; and then a cook who’s goofy and tries to get the kids to sneak off the boat and go into town.

The first mate musters the kids and gets them lined up and five kids are picked as first mates. They’re going to give all the orders to the rest of the crew, so these kids are learning leadership skills.

They learn listening skills. They don’t even move from our patio until they’re listening to that first mate and following all the orders properly. Then they march a long way, about 15 minutes to the end of the harbor to where the boat is docked, and then they are on that boat until nine the next morning.

The boat doesn’t leave the dock, but six of the crew go out on a dinghy to look for hides and tallow the crew has hidden in the harbor. There are five different groups. They all have different roles. One crew has to raise a barrel of water onto the deck, and it’s the hardest thing they’ve ever done. It takes them 20, 30 minutes using block and tackle, so they’re learning mechanical advantage. They finally get that barrel on the deck and they're exhausted.

And the second mate’s like, okay, that’s one barrel. Every time we’re in the harbor, you got to bring 70 of those on board. Let’s do it again. So they realize how hard they have to work.

Another crew is at the beck and call of the captain. Another crew has to cook dinner and breakfast for everybody, so they have galley duty. That crew does not have to do night watch, but all the other crews have to do two hours during the night doing night watch. And for these 10-yearold kids to be up on a deck in the middle of the harbor where there’s seagulls squawking and seals barking, and the smell of the salty air… I mean, that’s a special thing that most kids will never forget in their lives.

MS: Just to be up and about at three in the morning is probably a big deal!

GG: Exactly. Without their parents around. There are six or seven parents on board as safety officers, but really they don’t interfere with anything.

And then they’ll read stories. They’ll get letters from home from their parents, based on the fact that they’ve been away for a year or so. So those are pretty fun. And then, they’ll sing sea chanteys. They raise each other up on the bosun’s chair. So they’re learning teamwork. It’s really a great program for kids with language and learning challenges, because it’s all hands-on. We put a lot of low-income families, schools on board that would normally not have this opportunity. It’s a one-day program, so it’s hard to follow up.

You don’t know how this affects kids, but we had one young lady who, five years later, spent I think 10 days on the East Coast with her dad on a boat that had no engine, a tall ship, learned the names and uses of 150 different lines and spars. And at 16 she self-published a novel based on an English sea captain during the time of Lord Nelson. Who knows if any of that would’ve happened without her experience on the tall ship?

MS: Before the Mystic Cruzar came into your life, you were running this program on the Spirit of Dana Point. Do you have to modify the program to suit the new vessel?

GG: I mean, it’s all so new, but we have been down to the vessel, our education director, board chair, education committee chair, and we are in talks with [Captain] Christine [Healy] to see how it’s going to be adapted. The nice thing is, the schooner does have space below where you could hold classes and things like that.

So there’ll be adaptations. To be honest, there’s adaptations ever since the Conception disaster. We didn’t even get to do the overnight programs the last year before COVID, because that changed things here.

But we’re hoping to get back to where we can do the overnight program. This vessel is better setup for overnighting, for the most part.

MS: It has more bunks.

GG: It has more bunks. The problem is, they’re separate, so there’s a little bit of an issue overseeing those bunks at night, but the idea is, there’ll be some adaptations to this.

MS: You’d rather have a big bunk-house, dorm-room space than have all those private cabins.

GG: It’s a little bit easier to monitor what’s going on in those cabins. But you could leave the doors open. Or take the doors right off.

MS: Have you been on board yet?

GG: Yes. Just walked it though, for an hour or so.

MS: What was your impression?

GG: It’s a beautiful ship and it’s in really good shape, so I’m very happy. The deck configuration’s very different, and that’ll take some adapting to for this program and other programs that we want to do, but it was awesome. I thought the ship looks great.

MS: The new non-profit that the Chrismans are creating, Central Coast Ocean Adventures: will they be the owners and operators of the schooner?

GG: Yeah, which is great for us, because we have no financial liability. They’re assuming all that financial liability. Roger Chrisman is on my board. He’s actually the reason I’m here! He got me this job. He introduced me to the Museum, and I’ve been here for 15 years. He and Sarah, as a team, have been very supportive of the Maritime Museum and they’ve always wanted to get kids onto ships. I joke around that their motto is “no child left ashore.”

MS: I heard that from Christine. That’s a good line.

GG: Oh, did she credit me, stealing my line? All right. All right. [Laughs]

Roger has a boating background, he was Commodore at the yacht club here in Santa Barbara. They’re happiest when they’re getting kids out on the water. They’ve been looking for a boat for quite a few years. They’ve talked about it, and the timing is great, because the Ocean Institute has more challenges now that they’ve lost one of their ships. So it’s nice for us to have more opportunities to work with a tall ship.

The other program we hope to do is the Marine Science Program. We’ve been using a local fishing boat, and again, nothing’s set in stone, but we could do some of that program on this ship.

And again, they have that classroom space, where Christine has a projector. They could be showing phytoplankton, all sorts of things. Then there’s other trips to the islands for students, and adults that we could be working on as well, along with just fun events on a tall ship. Here in the harbor, on other tall ships, we’ve done Pirates of Penzance pieces and things like that. The Chrismans are very connected with the Santa Barbara Opera.

MS: The Channel Islands, I assume that those would also be overnight programs.

GG: Absolutely. You could sail all the way down to Catalina. Roger’s also connected with Catalina Island. I believe he’s on the Catalina Island Conservancy Board. It’s not just the four northern Channel Islands. We could do trips down to Catalina as well.

MS: When do you think that you might see the Mystic Cruzar in Santa Barbara for the first time?

GG: We’re hoping by May, and we would love to get it up here a few times over the summer. I know that there’s lots of work to do.

MS: Do your school programs break down evenly between spring, winter, and fall?

GG: We generally do that overnight program, the Before the Mast program, is in October. And we’ve been doing the Marine Science Program in January and February because of the break that the fishing boats we use have with fishing trips. But this would give us much more flexibility, time-wise, to do that program, because even here there are weather challenges doing it in winter. And we can expand that program beyond what was available to us before, too.

MS: Talking to Christine Healy, we both were wondering why the West Coast — and I realize the harbors are fewer and farther between — why this coast doesn’t support the volume of tall ships and traditional vessels that the East Coast does.

GG: That is a very good question. The harbors are one reason, and fewer harbors means higher slip fees and mooring fees. I’m not sure what slip fees are like on the East Coast. Certainly here in Santa Barbara, it’s expensive, and there’s really not even a permanent slip in Santa Barbara that they could bring that boat to. It’s a guest dock where they’re limited to how many days they can be here by the waterfront department.

MS: Anything else we should talk about in terms of how the boat’s going to be utilized on the West Coast?

GG: We are looking forward to using it! I know the Chrismans really want it to be used by everybody. I am so thankful to Roger and Sarah Chrisman for providing this opportunity to so many kids that might never get the opportunity to get out on the water, and they will make that happen with this purchase.

MS: Is there a cost to you for using the boat?

GG: We haven’t gone into all the details, but Roger and Sarah Chrisman are extremely generous to the Maritime Museum and they will, I’m sure, continue to be very generous to the Museum. They have made possible a lot of the work that we’re doing in education, and we couldn’t have done it without their support. ❂

For more info, search online for Central Coast Ocean Adventures, or visit the Santa Barbara Maritime Museum (sbmm.org) or Channel Islands Maritime Museum (cimmvc.org).