{"id":7165,"date":"2019-10-13T12:38:04","date_gmt":"2019-10-13T16:38:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jenniferbooher.com\/wp-walking\/?p=7165"},"modified":"2019-10-13T17:47:59","modified_gmt":"2019-10-13T21:47:59","slug":"interview-toby-stephenson-captain-of-the-osprey-college-of-the-atlantic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jenniferbooher.com\/wp-walking\/interview-toby-stephenson-captain-of-the-osprey-college-of-the-atlantic\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview – Toby Stephenson, Captain of the Osprey, College of the Atlantic"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I ran into Toby Stephenson<\/a> one day at the College of the Atlantic as he docked the college\u2019s research vessel, Osprey<\/em>, and recruited him for the Coast Walk to talk about his job as captain of the vessel and manager of the college waterfront. We met up at Mount Dessert Bakery on December 5, 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      Well, like I said\nin my email, I\u2019m asking people all over the island \u2018What do you do and how did\nyou end up doing it?\u2019 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      I got started as a student at the College of the Atlantic working with Allied Whale<\/a> and got turned onto working on the water. I started working on the whale watch boats during the summer as crew, and I was also really interested in marine mammals and whales and biology. That’s basically it. I persisted at working with marine mammals and wanting to stay on the water – they finally hired me for the job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      What is it that you do? I know you\u2019re the <\/a>Osprey<\/a><\/em>‘s <\/a>captain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Toby:      Yeah. I run the COA waterfront, which is the pier and the floats, the boats, and all of the flotsam and jetsam that go with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      The sailing\nprogram?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Yeah, sailing program, teaching students rowing, or motorboat operation, and keeping our equipment maintained, teaching navigation to students, and teaching them how to crew boats. It’s an informal teaching position. Rather than an intensive, short period of time, I get to do it over a long period of time with students that join our crew as work study. I teach them over several years how to drive the inflatables and have landings out on the islands, do general pier and boat maintenance down at the waterfront.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jenn:      What a cool work\nstudy!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Oh, yeah, it’s the best work study job at the college and my job is definitely the best job around! It’s fun. It’s always different. I drive out to the islands to bring food, supplies, people, equipment. We’ll take classes out and give them tours in the bay or take them wherever the instructor wants to go. We’ll do private charters, we’ve done weddings on the boat. We’ve done birthday parties, and a variety of trips like that, but we’ll also do research trips or recovery trips – University of Maine or some other research institution has a … Often they have these autonomous buoys, what they call Slocum gliders<\/a>, or wave gliders. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Slocum glider image from: https:\/\/www.whoi.edu\/what-we-do\/explore\/underwater-vehicles\/auvs\/slocum-glider\/<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

They’re like the moon rover. It’s a remotely controlled device from a lab at University of Maine or Bigelow Labs and it’s propelled by the motion of the waves. They can see where it is on the chart, like a GPS, and they can give it a course and steer it. But, they can’t obviously see where it is or what it’s doing, only virtually. Every now and then [the gliders] fail. Something gets broken or they get caught up in something out there and [the lab] needs to recover it, so we’ll go out and recover [the glider] for them, or we’ll take [a glider] out to put them overboard and test them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      That’s so cool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Yeah, it’s so fun. We put hydrophone<\/a>s in the water that sink down to the bottom. They’ll stay down for the season and then at the end of the season we’ll go and recover them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hydrophone diagram from: https:\/\/www.azosensors.com\/article.aspx<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      The hydrophone, is\nit listening or recording-<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Marine mammal calls. Yeah, these buoys sink down to the bottom and they drift suspended several feet off the bottom for the summer recording a tremendous amount of data. When they’re ready to be recovered, we’ll go out with a speaker that we put in the water. The speaker produces a sound sequence almost like a Morse code, and that tells the buoy to break its cable, and then it’ll float back up to the surface. We’ll go out there, listen to it, signal to it to begin the burn process, and when it floats up we’ll recover it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      That’s ingenious!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Students get to\nobserve it and they get to go out with the scientists and ask questions, so\nthat part is really cool. We’ve gone out to record. We’ve gone out for senior\nprojects. We’ve recovered different shark tags. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      Was it you who\ntowed the [dead] whale back a few years ago?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Yeah, we’ll tow\nwhales back if we have to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      It must have been\na little smelly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Bill Trotter, “College of the Atlantic students, staff dissect 50-foot sperm whale,”
Bangor Daily News, August 20, 2012<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      We’ve done that a\nhandful of times. A number of times actually we’ve towed whales with the Osprey<\/em>. We also take the University of\nMaine tech crew out to the weather buoys and we’ll tie off to the buoy, and\nthey’ll repair the buoys and work to upgrade them, and do some maintenance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      What do you do\nthis time of year? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      I’m winding down. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      Are the boats out\nof the water now?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Yep. Right now I’m\nlooking over my log book and seeing what we did for the college over the course\nof the year and how many students we took out, how many trips we ran, how many\nof them were for the islands, for courses, for private charters. I’m renewing\nthe licenses for the registration for different devices on Osprey<\/em>. We’ve got GPS devices that we need to renew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      You need a license\nfor those?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Well, they have to\nbe registered so if something happens, they know where to find you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      Oh, so they can\ntrack the signal of that particular GPS?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Yeah, it’s called\nan EPIRB, Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon. If we get in distress we\ncan trip the EPIRB, or it’ll do it automatically if your equipment gets\nsubmerged. It’ll send out a distress signal to the coast guard and then it’ll\nalso send coordinates with it and they’ll be able to determine where we are to send\na search and rescue unit. But all of that stuff needs to be re-registered\nbecause they like to keep things updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      I can see why.\nThat sounds like something they’d like to keep tabs on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      You paint the\nboat, or you change the number of passengers you’re allowed to have, or any\nadjustment to the safety equipment has to be recorded in that registration.\nWhen there are changes, you update it. I’m also winterizing our equipment, our\nengines, and-<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      What does that\nmean?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Well, so the outboard\nengines … It’s like a house, like people’s camps for the winter, if you don’t\ndo anything, the pipes will freeze and burst. Same thing, you have to winterize\nthe engines because you’re not using them so they don’t get rusty on the\ninside. Any water that’s in them gets flushed out, and any fuel is also flushed\nout because fuel will go bad and can corrode things if it’s left because of the\nethanol that’s in fuel. Everything needs to be covered. Plugs need to be taken\nout so if water does get in things, it goes out. For Osprey<\/em>, I actually have to put antifreeze in the engine itself\nbecause it has what’s called a raw water intake. It’s part of the cooling – seawater\ngoes into the engine and out the exhaust. I have to put coolant in the engine\nso the engine block doesn’t break. There’s all kinds of stuff – I go through\nequipment and take out stuff that needs to be replaced, so we go through flares\nand look over PFD’s and make orders for things in the spring. We have a weather\nsatellite on the boat, a Sirius weather satellite. I need to stop our service,\nso we’re not paying for it through the winter. I have to provide annual reports\nfor the season, and then I have to plan any repairs or maintenance projects\nthat I want for the spring. We’re working on a windlass and an anchor for the\nbow. A windlass is a winch that pulls the anchor up off the bow. We don’t have\none, so we’re installing one. … I got a new boat up and running this year. We\nre-powered it, a smaller research boat. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      That must have\nbeen exciting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Yeah, it’s fun. It’s a nice little boat, but the engine was bad in it and it was an inboard engine. I took the engine out and we put a new outboard on it. We’re going to use that for a small aquaculture program that we’re going to begin.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      No kidding! What\nare you growing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      We’re probably going to have a kelp string and we’d like to have oysters and scallops. We’d like to grow anything of interest because one of the things we want to work with – Chris Peterson<\/a> and Natalie Springuel<\/a> are working with local aquaculture farmers. She works through the Sea Grant program, and Chris teaches [at COA], and he’s on the Frenchman Bay Partners. … I’ve heard interest from students so I want to make that a possibility for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      That’s awesome. [Ed.note: Both Chris and Natalie have been part of the Coast Walk – see Chris’ field trip<\/a> here and Natalie’s interview<\/a> here.<\/em>]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      We got this small\nboat and a student is going to take on the aquaculture permit as her senior\nproject. She’s going to get the permit, or at least get us to the point where\nwe can have the permitting. Then, we’re going to put some kelp strings out there,\nand try and grow various things, and then Chris will work it into his Marine\nSciences curriculum somehow, but hopefully within a few years we’ll have stuff\nfor them to look at and measure growth, measure toxicity, it could be anything.\nLooking at the environmental halos, because algae sequesters CO2. They can help\nto reduce the acidity in the water column. There’s been some evidence to show\nthat because the rising acidity in the oceans can be detrimental to young spat\nin the formation of their shell [raising them] around kelp beds may be\nbeneficial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      That’s a cool\nidea. Like symbiotic farming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      It’s symbiotic\nfarming, exactly. We want to play around with that and see how that works.\nWe’ve expanded the sailing program. We’re looking into aquaculture, and [we\u2019re\nbusy] getting people out onto the islands themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      It sounds\nincredibly busy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      It is all over the\nboard, but yeah, but it’s fun. It’s good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      Are you part of\nAllied Whale, or are you strictly college?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      I’m strictly the\ncollege, but I was an Allied Whale student when I was a student at the college,\nso that was my work study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      Is Allied Whale a\nbranch of the college?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      It’s a separate entity, but the College of the Atlantic holds the permits. In order to [collect] marine mammal parts, you have to be approved by NOAA, and you have to be either a non-profit conducting research, or you have to be a museum, or you have to be an educational facility. We’re all three; we have a permit to have all of [our] marine mammals material. We also have the humpback whale catalog<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      That’s what, the\ntail fins?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Yeah, the flukes. Back\nin the 70’s, when Steve Katona was teaching marine sciences at the college, he,\nwith a handful of students, started looking at whales. It was right around the\nMarine Mammal Protection act and the boycott because the Russians and Japanese\nwere still hunting whales. The Americans were [hunting whales] up until 1972.\nMost of it then was happening down in the Antarctic. [The COA people] were studying\nthe whales and they noticed that you could tell them apart by the flukes. They\nbegan collecting photographs around Mount Desert Rock. Citizens used to go out\nand stay at the station during the summer and take photographs [from the top of\nthe tower.] It was a big community event. Then [the researchers] took those\nphotographs down to the Caribbean and started photographing whales down there\nand started comparing them, and then they found matches.  We’ve got over 7,000 individual humpback\nwhales recorded in our North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catalog, which is curated\nat Allied Whale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      That’s amazing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Steve and the\nstudents started this Allied Whale group back in the 70’s out of the college,\nbut it is somewhat independent because they do a lot of their own fundraising.\nIt’s a project in the college.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      So the college is\nthe umbrella?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Yeah, exactly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      Nice. There’s so\nmuch going on over there! I’m always thinking, damn, I wish I was a student\nagain. I would totally be in Natalie’s class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Oh, yeah. I know, I would have too. When I was a student, I took on the field stuff and I enjoyed it. It was essentially a pretty monumental study showing the seasonal movements of whales and that they actually had these migratory routes, and because you were able to identify individuals, you were able to start counting them. Those were two essential things, but the third and most important part of that whole, their study with photographic identification, was that it was non-invasive. You weren’t darting them, which is the way they used to do it. They’d shoot a dart into the whale, and when the whale was hunted years later, you’d come across the dart and it had a number on it that worked like a bird band, except it was lethal. This is non-invasive research … It got a lot of attention. One of my objectives when I took this job was to put \u2018Atlantic\u2019 back into the \u2018College of the Atlantic\u2019 because there was this period of time where … Well, nobody regretted Allied Whale and the work that was done, but all of a sudden, the College of the Atlantic became \u201cthat whale school.\u201d Human Ecology isn’t about whales. Human Ecology is about human ecology. Whales could be a part of that, but so could this can of San Pellegrino, depending on how you look at it, and how you monitor it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      You guys got a\nlittle typecast?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      It did. The college started to get typecast, so there was an effort, I think, to disassociate, \u2018We’re not just that whale school. We do other things. We do art, we do writing, we do history, we do science and math, etc. It’s bigger than whales.\u2019 When I was a student, the waterfront was there, but there wasn’t much going on. But, then we were given the Indigo<\/em>. Moe Brown was faculty at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      What is the Indigo<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      The Indigo<\/em> was our first … Well, it wasn’t\nthe college’s first research boat, but it was the first substantial research\nboat that you could actually sleep on. You could take it out for long distance\ntrips. It wasn’t a great boat. In fact, it was a pretty rotten boat. But it was\nfree. That began a little bit more of the activities down at the waterfront. I\nworked on the Indigo<\/em> when I was a\nstudent when they hired their very first full time captain. I became good\nfriends with Captain Andrew, but then I moved on to different things, and came\nback and was there for the last year of the Indigo<\/em>.\nBut, at the time, there really wasn’t a whole lot around the waterfront. It\nwasn’t really that active. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      About what time\ndid you come back?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      I started in 2011.\nI just finished my seventh year. I’ve just been trying to expand the\nwaterfront. We got new docks. We expanded the docks a bit. We’ve added boats\nand I’m doing more proactive training with students to use boats to go down\nthere and have access to boats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      It’s a really useful skill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      I’m trying to make it more experiential for the students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      How many students\ndo you work with, like work study and teaching?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      I usually have\nabout, over the course of a year, anywhere from four to six students that work\non Osprey<\/em> with me. I’ll be expanding\nthat a little bit this year so we can have some sailing crew as well. But\nthere’s always a bunch of other students that either want to do independent\nstudies or just need to get on the water somehow, so I keep in touch with them\nabout when we have trips, and when it’s appropriate to go, and not appropriate\nto go and so on. Maybe half a dozen to a dozen students throughout the year\ngetting special attention on the boat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      That’s cool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Yeah, it’s not a\nhuge number, but it’s growing. The waterfront’s definitely increased. I’ve\nadded a number of moorings and I’m opening it up for alums to be able to keep\ntheir boats there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      Nice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      So they come down\nto the waterfront and use it more with the hope that they take students [out].\nMore students on the water-<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      Yeah, build that\nalumni network.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Well, yeah,\nthere’s that too. … A very direct and specific request when I was hired was\nto get control of the waterfront.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      Oh, people just informally … ?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Yeah. There were moorings out there, but nobody knew who owned what. Some people would sublease moorings. I had one guy who was running private tours off the dock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      Completely\nunaffiliated?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Oh, completely\nunaffiliated and illegal, taking people out for money without a license or\nanything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      Oh, wow. What did\nyou do?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      I had to confront\nthem and say, “You can’t run your tours from our dock. It’s a private dock.”\nAll sorts of people would sail up and jump on his boat \u2026 so there were a lot of\npeople just coming up and using the property, which I personally don’t have a\nproblem with unless they’re smoking and making people uncomfortable by a\nperpetual presence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      But it also puts\nyou guys up to liability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      There’s that.\nThere’s definitely that. I don’t know that we could ever police it to the point\nwhere you eliminate that, but this was getting out of control. People would\nshow up and use moorings and there were all these expenses which the college\nwas having to shoulder. Now, people that have moorings have to pay for them.\nThere’s an annual fee so we have some revenue to help out because we have to\nreplace the pier, or repair the pier, soon. It’s going to be six figures. But,\nat any rate, at least there’ll be some sort of a fee structure –<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      That seems fair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Yeah, it’s\nunreasonable for the college just to be there as a [resource] … I always want\npeople to feel welcome. I just want them to also respect the facility and part\nof that is ownership and you get there by charging. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Well, I know a lot of people in the community … It’s not like we feel like COA is public, but speaking for myself I always feel welcome going on campus and I know a lot of us like to go down to that little beach. It’s the only place that I find those little graphite pebbles. It’s naturally occurring. It just washes up. When my kids were little, I would take them there and we would draw happy faces on all the little round beach stones and leave them. I never heard if anyone ever found them. We’d draw like a hundred little happy faces. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Toby:      How sweet. That’s\nfunny. Yeah, the beach was strewn with boats and kayaks and stuff. At high\ntide, that’s a small beach. It\u2019s the size of this room. There’s not a lot left.\nWe expanded the docks a little bit. I don’t let people keep boats on the beach\nso it’s open for Summer Field Studies to go down there and spread out or just\npeople to go down and show up and lay in the sun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jenn:      I’m one of them! [Ed note: Although I\u2019m beachcombing, not\nlying in the sun.<\/em>] The kayaks that are down there, are those the college’s\nkayaks?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Yeah, that is a\ntricky situation. Everybody wants to go kayaking, but … It’s much easier to\nfeel comfortable in grabbing a kayak [without] knowing anything about it than\nit is to grab a motorboat without knowing anything about it. If there’s a\nmotorboat, a rowboat, or a kayak, people will grab the kayak. Because they can\npick it up. They’ve seen people paddle. That’s pretty intuitive. \u2018Oh, yeah, I\nknow what to do with the paddle.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jenn:      It’s a lot easier\nto paddle a kayak than to row a dory, for sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Yeah, exactly.\nThey’re way more inclined to grab something like that and head out in the water\nand get in trouble than they are anything else. The kayaks have to be locked.\nBut the rowboats, I try to keep available for students. My policy down there\nis… I try to be very democratic about stuff. I just say here are the ground\nrules. If you wear your PFD, make sure somebody knows that you’re going out,\nand they know when you’re coming back, and you don’t go in X conditions, then\nthe boat is there, the PFD’s are there, and have fun. I don’t even need to know\nabout it just as long as you’re doing it this way. It’s a lot more freedom if\nyou are restricted through rules or regulation than if we didn’t have any and\neverything had to be under lock and key. I find I can give students a lot more\nfreedom if they respect the ground rules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      Are they pretty\ngood about that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Yeah, they are. On\noccasion there are problems and I will get loud about it, and angry about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      I remember doing\nsome dumb-ass stuff when I was in college.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      I did too, and I\nstruggle with it because you are who you are because of that. You’re walking\naround the island right now going to all these places along the littoral zone\nof the island exploring things in part because you went through the experiences\nyou went through. They helped shape you. I don’t want to clip anybody’s wings,\nbut my rationale is I want to show you the right way to do something, and then\nI’m going to let you do it the way you want. But, you have to learn the right\nway first. It’s something I constantly struggle with. I remember my first year\nI was working in the Davis garage where I keep all of our equipment and I had\nthe garage door open, and I went into town to go to Paradis to get something\nand I was gone for 20 minutes, or 25 minutes, something like that. I came back,\nand I got out of my vehicle, and I started working. A few minutes later, two\nstudents came up with a pair of oars in their hands. They weren’t oars, they\nwere wooden kayak paddles that were detachable in the middle, right? They were\nthe breakdown paddles, and they put them back. I said, “Hey, what are you\nguys doing?” They go, “Oh, we were going to go for a row and decided\nnot to. It was too rough.” There was a dory on the beach, this big\nfiberglass dory that weighs about 250 pounds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      They were going to\nrow it with half a kayak paddle?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Well, it gets\nbetter than that. They were going to row it with these old wooden kayak\npaddles, and the wind was really strong out of the West. The beach was flat\ncalm, but 200 to 300 yards out you were in three foot seas or more, and the\nwind was taking you further into Frenchman Bay. Just a couple years before\nthat, there was a young married couple at Lamoine and the husband got on one of\nthose sit-upon kayaks … He had a PFD I think, but he didn’t have a [wetsuit]…\nhe had a t-shirt and shorts. It was flat calm, but he was in the shadow of the\nwind, and it was beautiful, and then it shifted a little bit and dropped and he\ngot carried out in Frenchman Bay, and that was that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      That is so sad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Yeah, it was heartbreaking. Then, these students just like – Aah! If we’re not explicit over and over again about stuff –<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      The ocean will\nkill you if it can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      It’ll kill you, yeah. It won’t feel bad about it. That really jarred me … But at the same time I didn’t want to keep everything under lock and key because I appreciate risk and autonomy and responsibility. I want students to be able to have that, but-  There’s always things like that where students will grab canoes and go out to Bar Island and then get stuck out there. Not that often, but it happens every few years. The last time it happened, they took a boat without permission. There were three students, but they all had PFD’s, and they got out to Bar Island and they couldn’t get back. It was too rough. They made a phone call and they got rescued by I think the Harbormaster. Those are the stories where you want to … When they come back, you want to pat them on the back, give them a hug, and tell them \u2018Good job. I know you were an asshole for taking this equipment without asking, and you were stupid for doing it when you did it, but you were smart enough to recognize when it got too dangerous, and you didn’t let your pride get in your way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      Yes, \u2018thank you\nfor not dying.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      \u2018Thank you for\nhaving humility and not making it worse.\u2019 But, at least hopefully when they do\nthings like that, they’ll have a PFD like that kid or they’ll have sense enough\nto know \u2018This might kill us. Let’s not go there.\u2019 That is one of my big cruxes,\nand we’ve had this discussion with our islands crew about how do you let family\nknow that we have these resources and we’re going to teach your students to\ntake risks and it’s going to be dangerous, but it’s worth it even though you\nmight get the short straw? Over the course of a hundred years, you may be the\none that draws the short straw. We almost need to in a very upfront way just\nstate it. This is what we’re doing. It’s risky, it’s dangerous. If you’re not\ncomfortable with it, then don’t do it. But, if you are-<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      Well then frankly,\nstatistically, driving is probably a higher risk. The way I see it, it’s all\nabout learning what the parameters are, how strong you are, and what causes the\ndanger and how to manage it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Right. Now, quite\nfrankly, every generation learns from the previous generation. But, they also\nlose something when they do that. I know our kids are a lot smarter. We get\nsmarter, but the one thing I notice that they don’t have are coping skills, and\nthey come with this profound sense of entitlement. I think I had it. Every\ngeneration just steps it up another rung.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      Yeah, I think that\nmight be something about those college-age years. You haven’t discovered yet\nthat you’re mortal. Most college kids, at least the people I knew, had hardly\nbeen hurt ever. Maybe we broke our arm or something, but-<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      What we can do is\ntry and give them more real world experiences. It’s hard to do it in a course.\nIt’s hard to do it in 10 weeks, but if there are aspects to the college,\nprograms, or learning trajectories that transcend the term, like the work study\nposition on the boat – here I’m going to toot my horn – students have to learn\nhow to do safety drills and inspections on the boat and they work with me for a\nfew years, they’ll know how boats are supposed to be kept. They’ve learned how\nto drive inflatables in dangerous situations, and they get jobs down the\nAntarctic, or in the Arctic, or I\u2019ve got a student now who’s out on the Mariana\nIslands studying crows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      Oh, cool. Wow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Right? They’re\ncool people that have learned some really good skills that were applicable to\njobs. It’s really useful stuff. I’ve had three students, three of my crew that\nhave gone down to the Antarctic and worked on ships, and they get really good\nratings. They get rehired. I’ve had some that have gone up to Alaska to work on\nships, and this one student who’s down on the Mariana Islands … She was one\nout of 1,200 applicants for the job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      Wow. That’s so\ncool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Yeah, it’s\nawesome. Back to the leaning aspect of it, and the waterfront skills and the\nboating skills, \u2026 any adventure-type learning you can get it with, but the\nthing about boats, is that … If you learn rock climbing, that’s awesome. I\nused to do it. But, it’s hard to have rock climbing skills, and then get a job\noutside of the rock climbing world, or outside of the guiding world. But with\nboats you can get a job at US Fish and Wildlife. You can get a job on a tour\nboat. You can get a job at a research station. That type of experience has a\nbroader reach. But all of that stuff helps make you a better person, I think.\nMy hope is that we integrate a lot of the job experiences and work experiences\ninto the curriculum as well. The aquaculture would be another example of that, <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      I’m so excited\nabout that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      Yeah, getting\nfamiliar with the equipment and going out and doing the husbandry and\neverything of the stewardship of your crop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      Are you going to\ndo that right off of the college there?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toby:      I’m hoping to do\nit right off the college.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenn:      That’d be awesome\nbecause then the rest of the kids who aren’t in the program can see, or at\nleast be aware of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

And right about then we looked at the time and\nrealized we both had to run off to work. Thanks so much for chatting, Toby!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I ran into Toby Stephenson one day at the College of the Atlantic as he docked the college\u2019s research vessel, Osprey, and recruited him for the Coast Walk to talk about his job as captain of the vessel and manager… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7178,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jenniferbooher.com\/wp-walking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jenniferbooher.com\/wp-walking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jenniferbooher.com\/wp-walking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jenniferbooher.com\/wp-walking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jenniferbooher.com\/wp-walking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7165"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/jenniferbooher.com\/wp-walking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7181,"href":"http:\/\/jenniferbooher.com\/wp-walking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7165\/revisions\/7181"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jenniferbooher.com\/wp-walking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jenniferbooher.com\/wp-walking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jenniferbooher.com\/wp-walking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jenniferbooher.com\/wp-walking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}