| "You're always looking to achieve a balance out here; a balance between man-made and natural. If we can achieve this balance, then we are doing well." |
| -- Chris Newlan |
AARRRGGHH!!!!!!
I got a good seat. I was right next to the water tank! Chris was showing us the skates (a weird kind of fish) when a huge wave of salt spray flew over the side of the boat and drenched us all. Then Chris (still holding the skate) turned his head up and yelled, "AAARRRGGH!!" Automatically everyone started laughing. When we all stopped, Chris said, "When you're sailing and all, how many chances do you get to turn your head in the salt air and yell, aarrrggh!!?" Then another wave came over and we all yelled, "AAARRGGH!!!" Then we all started laughing our heads off!! Some girls started screaming a light, piercing, aaaahh, not a low, haughty AARRGGH!! (Here's the punch line!) So Chris said, "It's not AAHHH, it's AAARRGGH!!" |
| -- Jessie Karsif |
| On the ship I learned a lot. It was also very fun. The part I liked most was when we caught many animals from the ocean in a large net and brought them aboard. I learned about the animals and got to pick them up. I learned that the green crab has a joint so when it gets its claw bitten by a larger animal, it lets the animal take its claw and then it can just run off without the animal even knowing. We played sort of a game where the lady would hold up a crab and we had to tell if it was a male or female. The way you tell is that a male has a short, pointy "tail" and the female has a bigger "tail" that covers the whole stomach so they can carry eggs. When she was done explaining about the animals we caught, we got to pick them up. Schooner was great and I recommend it to anybody interested in marine biology. |
| -- Dan Shapiro |
| On May 22, 1997, I went on a schooner in New Haven with my class and another class from my school. "Could you all sit where you can all see the map?" Chris, one of the guides asked. He was holding a map of the New Haven Harbor. He asked a kid in my class to come and read some of the little numbers on the map. "10, 20, 15, 9" Ray read. Chris explained that those are the numbers of how deep the water is. He said (since we couldn't see the numbers because we were too far away) that there were small numbers next to large numbers, which means the water gets deep in the middle quickly. Usually water doesn't work like that. Mankind would have to make the water like that. That's exactly what happened. In the1800s, it was hard to get ships out in the deep water. They didn't want to build a huge wharf, so in around 1880 they dug out the middle of the harbor so you didn't have to go far to get to deep water. The harbor is presently 40 feet deep and 3 and a half miles long. |
| -- Janna King |
| I remember the most when the flounder we caught got so stressed out that it lost his lunch, in other words, he threw up! What he threw up was called a Mantis shrimp. Chris (one of the people on the boat with us) was surprised because the flounder was one of the very few things he knew that ate Mantis shrimp. The thing that the flounder threw up was surprisingly solid, it just looked chewed up. Chris held up the dead Mantis shrimp and told us more about it. |
| -- Meredith Newman |
| What I liked most about the trip is what we caught, like flounder, skates, spider crabs, and horseshoe crabs. The flounder got so stressed out with itself that it lost its lunch. It was a little Mantis shrimp that had little, but very sharp claws. When a fish came along it would lay on its back, stick its claws up, and cut the fish into pieces or even cut it right down the middle! |
| -- Jake Blasini |
| I found that schooner really taught me about how people are helping and ruining the harbor. We played a game in which we got to give the New Haven harbor a grade. The way it went was we looked at all the buildings as we passed them and wrote down the name of the building and what it did for the harbor (polluting was not an acceptable answer) and then we got to give the places a grade. Then we all met and gave the whole harbor a grade. It really taught me a lot about how we are changing the harbor. I gave the harbor a B+. |
| -- Ben Wormser |
