Retreat for School Leaders

Twenty teacher leaders and principals from across Maine came to the Hurricane Island Foundation’s inaugural Retreat for School Leaders in July 2013. This course offered “an opportunity to extend your own success as a leader of teaching and learning in your school.”

Over three days, the retreat blended small-group consultation, active team initiatives, and opportunities for conversation with a distinguished staff including Roland Barth, Gordon Donaldson (primary facilitator), Tom Edwards, Gloria Delsandro, and Sue Palfrey.

Hurricane Island proved a unique environment for leadership lessons.  Participants brought “leadership challenges” they face at school and left with plans to address one or two of these challenges.  The personal attention each received during the retreat was a highpoint for many: “I enjoyed being able to talk about issues and really focus on mine…  I found similarities with others’,” one leader reported.  Another said, “It was valuable to hear about other people’s challenges; it added clarity to my own.”

Participants took to the trails in a team-learning initiative, rowed in the waters of Hurricane Sound in a team-coordination initiative, and joined in service teams to contribute to the island’s learning infrastructure. "Conversation focused on leadership dynamics within teams and the strengthening of professional cultures in schools. Living together as a community of learners in the island’s camp-like setting added immeasurably to the Retreat for many. “There was a lot of motivation and energy,” said one participant. “People were very supportive,” reported another, “I was surprised by the trust given by the group.”

All declared, this first Retreat a resounding success.  HIF plans to build on this experience to offer more leadership learning opportunities to teacher leaders and administrators from Maine schools.  The island’s potential as a learning opportunity for leaders will grow in the future.  One teacher leader said it best: “I expected I’d do more listening [when I came to Hurricane] and not as much being listened to; that made this very powerful for me and [my fellow teacher leader from my school.]”

Vinalhaven 4th of July Parade

Marlin body construction by Oakley, paint by Alice

Hurricane Island staff represented Hurricane Island Foundation in this years 4th of July parade in Vinalhaven. The theme was "Adventure on the High Seas" so we based our float on Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea. Here is our marlin! 

Volunteer Day #1

We had a great crew out for our first volunteer day of the season (June 23, 2013) and accomplished so much! What a great way to get the island in gear for our upcoming programs!

Some of the main projects we tackled: 

• Re-building the 22' bridge along the coastal perimeter trail
• Herb garden stone addition, and planting the garden
• Stripping shingles from the West side of the galley

Returning tools from bridge-building

The group poses after a day of hard work!

Islesboro Science Night

On Thursday, June 6, Hurricane Island Foundation staff visited Islesboro for Science Night, an annual school-wide celebration and presentation of long-term science projects that students participated in during the past year.  The event featured arena-style presentations by 7th and 8th grade students of prototype inventions they designed, poster presentations by 5th and 6th grades about experiments they had conducted, a poster series by 11th and 12th graders on the Energy for Me audit of Isleboro Central School, and finally, a public presentation from the 9th and 10th graders “2013 Study of Possible Contamination Sources of Islesboro’s Fresh Water”  to fellow students, visitors, and community members.

This presentation by the 9th and 10th graders was a synthesis of water quality data they collected during an April 22-26 field week, where students went out with their environmental science teacher, Heather Sinclair, our Science Educator, Alice Anderson, and Aaron Megquier, from the Isleboro Island’s Trust to collect water samples and analyze them for fecal coliforms, turbidity, and salinity. Students also spent time learning about some of the policy regulating septic systems and wells on the island. All of this informed their articulate presentation recommending that community members on Islesboro should be aware of the status of their septic systems and wells in order to prevent contamination to Islesboro’s sole-source aquifer.

The idea for this project on Islesboro evolved from a three-day trip that the students had on Hurricane Island last September. Students spent time learning about the water resources on Hurricane, including the sole-source aquifer, historic dug wells, and quarry. The course was framed around the question “how should Hurricane Island manage its water resources.”  Students were able to build on the skills they learned on Hurricane to design and implement their field week on Islesboro.

George Stevens Academy

Eight students and two faculty members from George Stevens Academy (Blue Hill, ME) came out to Hurricane Island May 28-31, 2013 to spend time learning about Hurricane’s intertidal zone.

Our voyage started in Rockland, where the whole group toured FMC Biopolymer, the largest carrageenan factory in the world.  At FMC, we had to wear hairnets, hard hats, earplugs, and gloves in order to see the whole process of extracting carrageenan from red seaweed.  Carrageenan is used as an emulsifying agent that makes food products more palatable and attractive.  It can be found in toothpaste, salad dressing, and chocolate milk.

After touring FMC, we took the ferry over to Hurricane, and enjoyed a late afternoon hike around the island, dinner, and had an evening meeting discussing the logistics for the next day. Low tide (-1.3) was at 9:01 the next morning, May 29, so we woke up and immediately went out into the field to familiarize everyone with commonly found invertebrates and seaweed in Hurricane’s rocky intertidal zone.

After a day in the field exploring and learning how to look for and identify all of the critters hiding under rocks and seaweed, we asked the students to design a research project that would focus on some of these animals and address a larger question of “how do we characterize Hurricane Island’s intertidal?” The questions that students generated were “how far do periwinkles and whelks travel in the intertidal when their food source is removed?” and “what is the abundance of green crabs on Hurricane Island?”

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Team Winkle at their study site

Based on these questions, students developed an appropriate experimental design, formulated individual hypotheses, and carried out their experiments over the new two low tide cycles.  For the first experiment, we broke up in to two teams (team whelk and team winkle) in order to investigate some of the differences in travel distance between dog whelks, which eat barnacles, and periwinkles, which eat seaweed.

Students identified their study sites, counted and marked their respective dog whelks and periwinkles, cleared the site, and then returned their study subjects. At the next low tide cycle, we all came back to the sites to recapture the marked marine snails and identify if they were in the cleared site or in a meter radius outside the site.

Students also designed field guide entries of their own to help future students on Hurricane identify some commonly found macroalgae (seaweeds): rockweed, knotted wrack, sea lettuce, and irish moss. 

Penobscot Bay Stewards

We were excited to welcome 24 Penobscot Bay Stewards to Hurricane Island last week to learn about Hurricane's natural history, ecology, and quarry era. The Stewards Program is sponsored by The Belfast Bay Watershed Coalition in collaboration with the Maine Coastal Program, and provides participants with an opportunity for adults to learn about the Penobscot Bay region and ways to conserve its resources.  It meets through the month of May and addresses such topics as Penobscot Bay history, marine life, island ecology, coastal land, intertidal and marine habitats, geology, fisheries, aquaculture, the Penobscot Nation, water quality, conservation issues, and current regional issues with impacts on our environment and human life. After the program ends, each Steward is expected to do at least 30 hours of volunteer work in a related organization or project. 

We met some wonderful future volunteers through this visit, and look forward to their help and expertise in the future!

Proctor Academy Mountain Classroom

Procotor Academy’s (Andover, NH) Mountain Classroom program (10 students, 2 faculty) came out to Hurricane Island May 16-22, 2013 to finish up their cross-country trip investigating fisheries and food systems from California to Maine.  Students spent the first part of their stay on Hurricane completing their independent culminating projects, projects that covered a range of topics including herbalism, codfish, and shifts in the symbolism of coyotes across Native American tribes.

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After listening to some fantastic project presentations, we transitioned into exploring the world of the Maine lobster fishery, and on May 20th we dedicated the day to talking about lobster biology, how the fishery is managed, and the events that set the stage for Maine’s current lucrative lobster monoculture. We then used this knowledge to frame a conversation about recent shifts the lobster industry has seen: plummeting lobster prices, concerns with increasing water temperature affecting lobster survival, shedding patterns, and settlement in the Gulf of Maine, and concerns about the long-term sustainability of lobstering as the primary occupation in coastal communities.

After a break for lunch, we transitioned to looking at some of Hurricane Island’s research and demonstration traps, discussing how they work, and different construction restrictions lobstermen have to follow so they avoid ghost fishing if their traps are lost. Proctor students helped us paint our new lobster buoys (see image below) for our additional traps which will be used this summer. 

Part of our afternoon was also spent hiking around Hurricane collecting trash that has washed up in the intertidal.  We collected 5 contractor bags of mostly buoys, rope, empty Clorox bottles, and soda bottles. Given the number of traps in the water, it was not surprising that a high percentage of the marine debris we found were associated with the lobster industry.

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The next morning, we traveled to Vinalhaven and spent the morning talking with different community members about their experiences in the lobster industry and learned a little bit about the culture and flavor of a piece of Maine’s working waterfront.

We then regrouped for lunch and met with Doug Littlefield from the Vinalhaven Co-op, one of the oldest Maine lobster buying Co-ops (Est. 1974).  Doug explained more about the cost of doing business as a lobstermen, and helped us wrap our heads around the thousands of pounds of bait distributed from this facility and thousands of pounds of lobster coming into Carvers Harbor.  We also met with Tristian Jackson who is part of a group working to form a new IAM lobstering union, Emily Lane, who spoke about challenges and strategies in marketing Maine lobster, and finished off the day with a trip out on lobsterman Jason Day’s (F/V Alexander Gabriel) to watch him haul a few lobster traps. That evening we warmed up from a chilly and wet day with a Maine lobster dinner.

Proctor Academy Mountain Classroom

The Hurricane Island Foundation hosted ten Proctor Academy students and two of their staff for 6 days on Hurricane Island. Their work included a Lobster Fisheries Program for two days in May.

These students had been traveling from the West Coast to East Coast of the continental US studying food systems from fisheries on the West Coast to agricultural farming in the Midwest. Proctor students used Hurricane as a place to work on their independent projects as the culmination of their cross-country trip. They also did service work, including digging the ditch for the cable for our power system. In addition, these students spent two days doing a program on lobster fisheries, and visited the Vinalhaven Fisherman’s Co-op as part of this study.

A snapshot of materials covered in this course:

• Overview/Presentation of Lobster Fishery in Maine- Policies, Regulations, Zone descriptions, DMR, Trap limits, Annual Yields, Bait industry, Distribution, Canada/US, Stock Assessment, Lobster research in Maine etc., take Department of Marine Resources (DMR) Recreational Lobster License Exam.
• Overview of lobster gear (traps, rope, buoys, bait, tools etc.).
• Buoy painting
• Coastal Cleanup—collect fisheries related marine debris around Hurricane
• Lobster Anatomy and Biology
• Trip out on a Vinalhaven lobster boat