Boston Whalers training

On November 30, 2019, our programs received a great boost in hands on and experiential education. The NY Harbor School received 5- 13ft Boston Whalers from the NYPD Harbor Unit and 2 engines through the Billion Oyster Project. Our senior class and waterfront were working on the Boston Whalers to get the new engines in and ready for BOP to do work on them. The senior class was split into groups with three in each for the Whalers and taking turns learning how to tiller the boats. With all the small boat training that I've had throughout the years, I've been on the vessel operations program and worked in the summer, I believe that working on the Boston Whalers were the hardest boats that I've worked with. I had a lot of trouble not throttling up tp hard and had trouble remembering to put the boat in reverse, neutral then waiting five seconds, to go back to forward. With these boats, you have to constantly reverse and go forward because little mistakes of going too fast can lead to big problems. And if you turn too much to one side that whole boat makes a big turn, so when going to one side, you have to make sure your pushing/ pulling the tiller slowly to prevent any accidents. Some techniques I worked on was, Straight ahead departure is when leaving a dock avoiding hitting the hull(back) of the boat I had to head with enough space for me to be able to turn the boat away from the dock. A second technique I worked on was Driving backward, this one was harder than the other techniques because I had to keep looking in front and behind me to avoid hitting anything around me. Lastly I was told to dock our boat, this part was the easiest for me because after already getting used to driving the boat it was easier to drive and then with the water mainly drifting us, I don't need to throttle the engine as much as I needed it to drive around, I pointed in one direction and the water current slowly drifted me to where I needed resulting in a clean docking. I thought since I've been sailing and they use tillers I would have a lot of experience I working on Whaler, but the difference is that on my sailboats they may have tillers we don't need to throttle to make sure that we aren't going too fast or slow, the engine has a constant speed for us so mistakes wouldn't happen. As a senior, a goal for me is to be fully trained on the small tiller boats such as the Whalers because not everyone has the opportunity to do amazing things at the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School.

~Nereida DeJesus