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01/27/2016 07:30 AMThere is snow on the ground; frost on windowpanes; ice melt in the garage. Why think about summer except as a cold-weather fantasy?
Because, as Ann Courcy points out, this is the time to sign up for the most quintessential of summer activities: sailing school.
Pettipaug Yacht Club in Essex opened up registration for its youth sailing program at the beginning of January. Ann, who lives in Deep River, notes that membership in the club is not necessary to attend sailing school. Any young person between the ages of 8 and l6 is eligible.
The will be water, boats, and excited youngsters, but something will be different this year. Longtime instructor Paul Risseeau, a former commodore of the yacht club and a summer fixture at sailing school, passed away last November. Ann, who worked with Risseeuw and has taught both sailing and windsurfing at Pettipaug, will be leading the instruction.
Ann brought something new to the program last summer: lessons that connected the art of sailing with up-to-the-minute STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) topics. She herself took STEM workshop to prepare for the lessons. Under her guidance, young sailors learned about topics from the concept of buoyancy, where they used different objects like marbles to learn about displacement and determine whether an object would sink or float, to sessions on protecting the environment.
Far from resisting the summer lessons, Ann says they were very popular at sailing school. The students particularly liked charting how long it would take different substances to degrade in water.
“Do you know how long it takes a glass bottle to decompose?” Ann asks, and then answers: 1,000 years and for Styrofoam the statistic is even bleaker. “Styrofoam never decomposes.”
Ann will again do the science classes this year.
Teaching children and families to love the outdoors is what Ann loves to do, whether it is at Schoolmates, the independent preschool located on the property of Bushy Hill Nature Center, or through the blog that she writes, barkingfrogfarm.com. The farm exists not as an agricultural entity, but as a space in Ann’s mind to cultivate her own ideas about the natural world.
“It is my place to grow, develop, and share my ideas, beliefs, plans, about getting people connected to nature. My readership is really adults who want to put a connections with nature into their lives and their families’ lives,” she explains.
Recent posts include an essay about special end-of-year hike with the four-year-olds at the preschool, as well as her own family’s outdoor adventures. Some of her posts have been picked up and shared at Children and Nature Network’s Community Forum.
Ann chose a frog as the signature animal for her blog because she says frogs are barometers of the condition of their natural surroundings. When frogs mutate, it generally indicates a harmful environment.
“It is a call to arms to fight for the planet,” she says.
(She added the word farm to distinguish her blog from a restaurant in Seattle that she learned was called the Barking Frog.)
In addition to her blog, Ann works through the Deep River Land Trust, of which she is a board member, on an annual program at Deep River Elementary School to encourage children to sign a pledge to live without electronic screens for a week.
“It used to be just television, but now there are screens like iPads that are a part of the children’s lives,” she explains. “I work hard to get kids unplugged. There is great value in the electronics, but we can’t let that be everything. We have to get kids into nature and let them engage and enjoy it.”
Ann’s own growing up in East Granby included both a lot of outdoor exploration and a lot of sailing with her family. The sailing, she says, taught her lessons beyond how to manage a boat.
“You learn resilience, fortitude, and how to think on your feet,” she says.
Her whole family sails together in a Pearson 30 sailboat that Ann’s husband Dave renovated himself. Dave is currently the commodore of the Pettipaug Yacht Club.
Two of Ann’s three children will be sailing students at Pettipaug this summer and her grown son, now 23, also went through the program. She has experience teaching her own children; she was director of Deep River’s summer Park & Recreation program for two years when her children were involved in it.
“They have experience with mommy running the show and it wasn’t a problem. They have more important things to do than run after me,” she says.
In college at Central Connecticut State University, Ann studied sociology and became a social worker. After graduation, she took a photography workshop, fell in love with taking pictures, and moved from social work to graphic arts and still maintains a free-lance production and layout business. She has taken advanced nature workshops as well as advanced training for her role as a sailing instructor. At the beginning of February she is attending a U.S. Sailing symposium on running a sailing program.
Not every child is enthusiastic about sailing at the beginning. Ann remembers a young girl clinging to her mother’s skirt at the beginning of one session. By the end of the three-week program, she had a huge grin on her face. The once hesitant sailor was registered for the next session and when Ann saw a wary new participant, she put her with the now-enthusiastic girl.
“They went out together and there were big smiles all around,” Ann recalls.
There will be challenges with recalcitrant sailors, mischievous sailors, and enthusiastic sailors. But this summer, Ann will be on her own.
“It’s going to take many feet to fill Paul’s shoes, but I am going to do my part,” she says.