Two days prior to my Bali trip I had a phone interview for a part time job out on Catalina Island as an outdoor educator. However, to accept the position I needed to attend a week-long training on the island that started the day I returned from Bali. As you can imagine, that left a less than ideal amount of time for me to do laundry, repack, adjust to the 15 hour time difference, and debrief with my family about Bali. Yet, not even 20 hours after landing at LAX, and running on only 2.5 hours of sleep (thanks to stupid jet-lag), I was on a boat heading to Whites Landing, Catalina to make what I could only imagine would be a phenomenal first impression. But I guess my sleep deprived kookiness was just what they were looking for because after a week of training I was officially employed.
My new job has a wacky schedule. School groups sign up for different workshops that run for a total of either 3 or 5 days. So, some weeks I work only 3 days, other weeks not at all; and some weeks I will be working back to back including weekends! Actually, my employer said I can live there full time and work as many hours as I want, but our lease on our apartment isn’t up until June, so I will be commuting from the mainland to the island at least until then.
This week was my “student teaching” opportunity. I worked for 3 days with my supervisor to teach/lead/assist students in snorkeling, kayaking, tide pooling, survival skills, the ropes course, and an ecology hike. We had a total of 19 sixth grade students and 2 chaperones that we worked with. Overall I would call it a success. I’m not so sure that the kids or chaperones would agree though. Basically, the survival skills portion of our program was a little to REAL for them, and for me.
Actually, the survival skills workshop consisted of constructing debris shelters and starting fires on the beach, but the REAL survival skills came into play during our kayaking lesson. My supervisor and I lead our students and chaperones around the cove for about 30 minutes before a freak windstorm started blowing the students’ kayaks out to sea and I learned why it's California state law to wear a life jacket when kayaking. I paddled out after one set of kids (each kayak fits two kids) only to find another set being blown away right behind me. I managed to “raft up” with both kayaks which meant I was holding on to the back of two kayaks to keep us all together as one big raft. I asked for the two students in the back of each kayak to then hold on to my boat, and the two students in the front of each kayak to back-paddle. Since I could not get all of our boats turned around to face the cove, I was determined to paddle backwards as hard as I possible could and haul their boats with me backwards to shore. Unfortunately, the 5-6 foot swells were having none of that. After 15 minutes of paddling for dear life and getting no where, having seen that the rescue boats were being dispatched, I resolved to let the waves take us further out to sea and to focus on keeping hold of my 4 students until the rescue boats could get to us.
I reassured them that the reason we were not being rescued was because the boats were going out after other students who didn’t have a teacher with them. The students agreed that their peers without a teacher were a higher priority and should be rescued first because they were probably, “freaking out.” So, when a rescue boat did finally come by I told them that we were okay and that they should rescue other kids first.
That might have been the hardest thing I have ever done! We were nearly a mile out in open-ocean where my childhood phobias of deep water and shark attacks were flooding back to me, and I had to reassure my students that nothing bad would happen to us and that the rescue boat would come back for us eventually. You can safely assume that since you are reading this that the rescue boat did eventually come back for us. After a 2 hour kayaking/character building lesson, all 19 students, 2 chaperones, and my supervisor were rescued, and my initiation test was over. I think it’s safe to say I passed.
