Stuart Carlton 0:00
Teach me about the Great Lakes. Teach me about the Great Lakes. Welcome back to teach me about the Great Lakes, a twice monthly podcast in which I A Great Lakes novice, ask people who are smarter and harder working than I am to teach me all about the Great Lakes. My name is Stuart Carlton, and we're back finally, finally, finally. And this is actually a very special episode to be back for, because this one recorded out in the field. We had an opportunity. If you remember the lake awards from this year, you go back and listen to them. They're back in December. We'll go to teach me about the red lakes.com one of the leaky award winners for Great Lakes. Non animal of the year was the inland seas, which is a sailing vessel from the inland seas Education Association is the 77 foot long schooner that does outreach and education work with with children's groups, typically, or school groups, or whatever. And Julianna illisic Over there reached out and said, Hey, Stuart, we're going to be in Chicago. Would you like to come on the boat? And when somebody says, Would you like to come on the boat, the answer is, well, yes, we would like to come on the boat. And so Rene and I actually went out there. I'm recording this on Wednesday, July 19. We went out there on yesterday, Tuesday, July 18. Got to spend a couple hours out there, learning from all the cool people on the boat, getting to see the schooner in action. And we just recorded little, sort of mini interviews with a number, a good chunk of the crew. And so we're going to present those two here, sort of stitched together with some interstitial sound from the from the boat, I think is the best way to put it. And we're going to bring that to you right now. And we asked Quinn to do kind of a heavy lift on this one to make because we're not live audio producers, right? This is an NPR. We have no idea what we're doing. And so then our typical mode of operation is to then take this on, our wonderful editor, Quinn rose, and say, Quinn, we don't know what you're doing. Can you make something of this? And so you and I will find out live together what she was able to make of this. But beforehand, before we get going, I do want to say thanks to Juliana and the entire crew of the of the inland seas and the entire group there. It's really neat groups. I would go check them out@schoolship.org and if you're ever in Michigan, near Traverse City, where they are, you should definitely try to get on a boat. If they're ever in your neighborhood, you should definitely try to get on it there too. Just get on the boat. That's what you need to do. And so with that, we present you our day on the inland seas. I

Rebecca Hancock 2:29
Yes, so my name is Rebecca Hancock, and I'm the mate aboard the inland seas, and I have been here. This is my third season. I've held a license since 2003 I went to the Maritime Academy in Traverse City, Michigan, and yes, so I actually have an unlimited tonnage license, which means that, like, no matter how big the ship is, you know, as long as it's near coastal, like the license I currently hold is near coastal, which means that I can go Up to 200 miles offshore. And so I could, you know, take a couple of tests and whatever, like getting, you know, upgrade to an ocean license, but I've been busy working, so I haven't made that jump yet, but I've worked on all different sorts of vessels in the time since I've had my license. I started out working on freighters on the Great Lakes for about 12 years, and then a couple of research vessels, most immediately before inland seas, I was working for on cruise adventures, which is a small cruise ship company that, instead of taking people shopping, takes them out into the wilderness. And, you know, they go hiking, they do kayaking, stand up, paddle boarding, Skiff tours, they go to different Great Lakes. No, no, this is so this ship that I was working on, we did winter in Baja and summer in Alaska and southeast Alaska. Great was terrible. It's just awful.

Renie Miles 3:55
So how is it different here, working with the kids, compared to your previous adventure?

Rebecca Hancock 4:02
Well, cargo does not talk, so there's that. It's also a very different work culture, and so, you know, the purpose of this vessel, as opposed to, you know, all of the other ones that I worked on, you know, pretty much for profit of some sort, and the fact that we are, you know, both at our home port in suns Bay, Michigan, as well as when we're traveling, we're basically taking The message of our program and, you know, inviting the interaction with the things that are in the water. You know, learning about sailing and it's, it's a very fulfilling job as compared to, I mean, I've enjoyed all of the ships that I've worked on, but particularly. To inland seas. You know, even at the end of a long day, a long week, a long month, you know, particularly when we're traveling, you know, there's just a lot that goes into that logistically. And you know, there's a lot of demands on our our bodies and our minds and everything like that. But you know, at the end of the day, no matter how long it's been, you know, there's that satisfaction of knowing that we as a group and a team are all making a really big difference, both, you know, taking people out on the water, getting them to think about things that they do in their daily life differently. And, you know, we can't know the impact that just even a single sail like this might have on somebody's life, to where they remember that and they go study biology, or they become sailors themselves, or, you know, just many different trajectories that might not have been present otherwise,

Stuart Carlton 5:58
or even just know that There's a lake here. I think

Rebecca Hancock 6:01
sometimes, yeah, it's amazing how people that live near water, particularly when those places are cities, the people who live there may have never, you know, done anything, interacted with the water, you know, depending on what kind of community they come from, and, you know, that kind of thing. So it's, it's a little bit strange sometimes to, you know, for us coming from away, to be the ones that are like, let me introduce you to this thing that's like, right here, but I mean, somebody's got to do it right.

Stuart Carlton 6:33
So why did you move from like, I don't know if this is like industry to to this or like, I don't want the right term is, but what, what made you make that so you talk about how it's really rewarding in different ways and and, but were you looking for that sort of fulfillment, or you just don't want to be out at sea for months at

Rebecca Hancock 6:51
a time, or what it's got that there are a lot of factors in my decision. And you know, This certainly isn't, you know, the only thing that I'll ever do for the rest of my career, necessarily, when I got my license, I told myself that I would do the best of my ability work in as many different maritime environments as possible, types of ships and stuff like that. I still have this, like, you know, I don't want to say secret, but like, still present dream to work on a tugboat. And I'm definitely romanticizing it, because from the people that I've talked to, they're working on a tugboat. They're adorable. They are particularly the small ones, you know, like, they're really tiny. Yes, seriously. So what you have is, like, a very powerful thing in a small package. And I can get to that I'd like, I relate to it.

Stuart Carlton 7:44
You mean, because you're not as Hall of stature or something,

Rebecca Hancock 7:47
because I'm a somewhat tiny person, yeah, like nobody's able to see what I look like. But, you know, just like my mother, you know, I share the the presence, if you will, feel the power coming through. They do, you know. And sometimes they don't always like it, but, you know, that's their problem, right? So, when I came here, you know, I live in the area, COVID happened. So the other job that I had kind of evaporated for a little bit, and I was looking for something else. And, you know, it wasn't motivated necessarily by, like, staying home. It's a convenient part about it. You know, my husband would probably agree, but it just was something that I had an interest in. And I have an undergrad that I did before the Maritime Academy from College of the Atlantic. So I have a Bachelor of Arts. Yes, Bachelor of Arts in human ecology, which people just kind of go, huh? Yeah, that's

Stuart Carlton 8:44
what they offer there. I forgot I got their stuff, yeah, yeah, okay. I mean, I was on the

Rebecca Hancock 8:49
mailing list. Not that many people have even heard of the school. And then once you go down the road of Human Ecology, their Phase kind of goes like, you know, you take the study of ecology and then you put the human part in that. Like sometimes science does not, but we have to, how do you not, right? And so, I mean this particular job very much, you know, calls upon all of that experience and study and everything like that. So wrap

Stuart Carlton 9:15
up question. Wrap up question, yeah, I can ask everybody else. I just thought of it is all right? So what's not that exciting? What's one thing you've learned about the Great Lakes that you want to share with our audience? Oh, it's a great lakes factoid, a Great Lakes factoid. It's a great factoid about the Great Lakes

Rebecca Hancock 9:34
that well. I mean, certainly the fact that it's 20% of the

Stuart Carlton 9:39
world's fresh water, percent of the world's special, which is

Rebecca Hancock 9:41
surprising, yes, you know, because the Great Lakes are just kind of this, like, sort of sleeper, in a way, like people haven't even really an air bird of them. But I don't know that I really knew much about the Great Lakes before, just, you know, going ahead and moving there, yep.

Stuart Carlton 9:57
So, no, that's true. My family comes up from the. Old South and Britain, they're like, oh, and

Rebecca Hancock 10:02
they're, you know, often not given the credit that they deserve. You know, people think, oh, like lakes, whatever. It's not that rough, it's not that big of a deal. Like, you don't have to know what you're doing to sail on them, and just a lake, you really do have to know what you're doing. That's not exactly true of some of the people around, you know, in the the smaller boats, yeah, excellent.

Stuart Carlton 10:24
Well, thank you so much. Rebecca, yeah, absolutely. All right. So they're dropping it down into the water. We're supposed to call out

Renie Miles 10:37
five. All right, guys, if you are not lowering the net, could you take a couple steps back, please, to give them a little space. Thank you.

Stuart Carlton 10:44
This whole trip has been politely telling me to move

Gillian Bucha 10:54
Hi. My name is Gillian Bucha. I am the stem and Internship Coordinator here at inland seas Education Association. I wear many hats for the organization. This is my seventh season with inland seas, and I am a full time employee, but it's fun, more fun to say seasons, you know, seasons? I thought you didn't hurt me. They're seasons because you're not doing this in the winter, correct? Yeah, the boat is only operating May through October. Need

Stuart Carlton 11:17
to put some icebreaker stuff on the front. So what are some of your things, your hats,

Gillian Bucha 11:21
some of my hats that I wear, I'm one of the lead instructors on board. So I lead programs, just like Juliana is doing today. I also lead our overnight programs in the summer, so I'll be on for five days at a time. I also post for interview, for recruit train interns with the organization, and this year, I had six interns in the spring, yeah, and three continued on in the summer. So

Stuart Carlton 11:50
are these, I guess, college students. And do they stay on the boat? Are there interns here now?

Gillian Bucha 11:55
There? Abby is not on board now. Today is her day off, which is why I'm working as a deck hand. One of my other hats is that I cross train as a crew member. So I am being a deck hand for Abby. She's off this morning. But they are not just college students. There's no enrollment requirement for internships. That is how I started, was as an intern. And I was three years out of college already at the time. So had they had the enrollment requirement, I would not even be here. We'd all be too Yeah. So I keep that it's it's not, you don't have to be in school. We do have a minimum requirement because we work with teenagers, and 18 years old is just a little too close to 17, gotcha. So, yeah, so and I'm the person that trains them, and I do consider them internships and not summer jobs. And there is a difference. What is the difference in your mind? My mind, an internship offers mentorship opportunities and networking opportunities so people that are like if maybe you're changing career directions, internship not a summer job. Internship means I want a little bit more mentorship and connections to networks. So I work really hard to make that happen for my interns. So it's not just a summer job. There is, yeah, these are paid internships. Yeah, we believe strongly in paid

Stuart Carlton 13:15
editorialized I don't think or because I'm a humble public employee, but you kind

Gillian Bucha 13:19
of paid it. Yeah? I agree with that as well. So yeah, and our internship program has been growing in northern Michigan. One of our challenges in the Traverse City area is actually housing. It's a very touristy area, lot of second home ownership. In 2019 we remodeled our whole center, our building, and we redid our basement into a 40 bed dorm space. We actually offer on site housing for our interns. Now we're able to do that because housing was a major issue. It meant you could only recruit interns who had a place to live or a connection to the northern Michigan region. And we're now that we can offer housing. We can break that. And I've had interns from as far away as Florida, and this year, in the spring, I had someone who goes to school in Kingston, Ontario, so Lake Ontario was represented this year in my interns. So

Renie Miles 14:10
speaking of interns, and you started, why this?

Gillian Bucha 14:17
Yeah, so I had a quote, unquote, real job as a hydrogeologist, and my background is in earth sciences, and I really just did not enjoy that at all. I wanted to work with people in science, so I was looking for opportunities to do science communication, really and informal science outreach. So lots of things through National Park Service, a lot of federal through the federal jobs agencies, a lot of nonprofits were out there, but a lot of them had that enrollment requirement. And I was three years past graduation, so this one did not, and I applied. And I mean, I'm from Milwaukee, Wisconsin originally, so I have a strong connection to the Great Lakes, and I did well in my interview. And. They hired me on I hadn't thought about the idea of the enrollment

Stuart Carlton 15:02
thing, because one thing we're always talking about is, is, how do we work to improve our representation and diversity and things like that, but, but when you have a I hadn't thought about enrollment requirement being a potential barrier to people who might be switching careers, and that's

Gillian Bucha 15:15
yeah, or they've done two years of college and they didn't like that major, and they're kind of in an in between space. Yeah, those enrollment requirements really kind of make you feel like you missed a window. That's

Stuart Carlton 15:25
interesting. Yeah. So one thing should be saying the stem coordinator, when y'all are thinking about programming or your education or whatever, do you spend a lot of time thinking about standards and worrying about standards? Or Yes, we

Gillian Bucha 15:36
actually, we have an education coordinator. Hey, it's Tricia. She's not on board. So that's a whole full time job, and it's in and of itself. Yeah, so that our school programs, when they're coming on field trips, they can justify that to their administration and say, like we are actually hitting these science or social studies or, you know, English language standards mostly stem standards, but Language Arts is in there too, as well. So

Stuart Carlton 16:01
you do get a lot of schools that come in, not just so we're out today with, uh, yep, the Boys and Girls Club, but, but, but,

Gillian Bucha 16:08
yeah. So in the summer, school's out, right? But we start operating in May. So we get like that last six weeks of the K 12 school year, and then we go all the way into October, about mid October, so from Labor Day to mid October, we get about a six week season with schools back in session. So yeah, there's like a spring, summer and fall season for us. Yeah, within that, and it's a lot of school groups coming as clap classroom field trips.

Renie Miles 16:32
So yeah, and so the how do the kids, how do those schools find you?

Gillian Bucha 16:38
Oh, yeah, well, it's usually through a lot of teacher recruitment, energy and as well as administrations and stuff. So some of my other colleagues attend, you know, the Michigan Science Teachers Association conference every year. Some of my colleagues attend Great Lakes educator type conferences every year. And so that's kind of how we're getting our name out there, Juliana, who's leading today, also runs a four day professional development for teachers, and that's a great recruitment strategy. One thing it is through teachers to recruit, to get their classrooms out, but it's also through their administration, their principals or superintendents have to understand the value before they can approve field trips, you know. So there's, there's a lot of strategizing through that way is, you know, district level.

Stuart Carlton 17:29
I taught middle school for a couple of years, and getting the field trips to happen.

Unknown Speaker 17:33
What about I have to put the phone, I mean, the microphone down.

Unknown Speaker 17:38
Thank you. All right,

Stuart Carlton 17:39
so now we're doing more sailing. The thing about being on a schooner, I guess we're scooting right now, is that, well, here's a question. I guess you have to do your thing. This is Rebecca, again, all right. Why is it called a schooner? Rebecca?

Rebecca Hancock 17:53
Well, as far as like, the actual word, humbly, I don't know the etymological history of the word schooner. However, it does mean that it's a sailboat with at least two masts. Two masts

Stuart Carlton 18:09
at least and I learned that the main mast has to be as tall or taller than the four mast. Yes.

Renie Miles 18:16
Is there a reason why the sails are such an interesting color? Kind of coppery brownish color. Yes,

Rebecca Hancock 18:23
may I coming across they look cool, but traditionally, the sales were tan bark that like the color, and then were treated to help them last longer, okay, and so that process made them red. So

Stuart Carlton 18:41
this color is just sort of reminiscent of that. I mean, these are just what nylon or something dacron.

Rebecca Hancock 18:46
So it's a synthetic material, but it lasts for eight or 10 years. The suit of sales, we got a new one. Our new ones made this year by a guy who's about 1000 years old and still at it, he pretty much came out of retirement.

Stuart Carlton 19:04
What percent of sales are made by a guy who's 1000 years old probably, like,

Rebecca Hancock 19:08
a very high percentage, because it's, you know, it's just like a lot of trades are, like, really specialized things that people do, like this, you know, the the younger people right now. I mean, I hope it's becoming more popular to, like, take on those sorts and learn those sorts of jobs. That's a whole deal, right? You're gonna have to learn it from someone that's been doing it. And really, you know, another thing that you would really have to have a strong passion for because, I mean, you know, it's a lot of work. Yeah, I hate to hear that it's a dying art. Yeah. You know, traditionally rigged schooners are still out there and doing things. But even just what we're doing is not not a dying art. But I mean, certainly across the maritime industry. You know, there's not enough people, so more people need to become sailors,

Stuart Carlton 20:06
you know. So you don't know why things are called schooners. You know what a schooner is, that's okay. What's the um, how big is this schooner? We are 78 feet. 78 feet. And if I wanted to buy a 78 foot schooner ballpark,

Rebecca Hancock 20:19
Oh, geez. Um, I mean, I think it's a pretty wide range of, you know, cost as far as, like, 20 bucks, what? Okay, well, more than 20, probably in the millions. That's what I was afraid. Yeah, I want to say 750,000

Unknown Speaker 20:37
in 1994 1994

Rebecca Hancock 20:41
a lot more than that.

Stuart Carlton 20:44
Last year was 1.2 million. This year it's 1.8 Thanks. How much you got? No, not that is the answer, right? But it is. It's an if you have to ask, right? But it's a really cool but so the point is actually, so here you are giving these kids, the Boys and Girls Club today paid $0.00 a chance to go on a $2 million schooner, essentially, and to get an education. So that's unbelievable. So people want to donate? Here's the move to help keep up this. I said 2 million, it may not be but this very expensive schooner, where should they go to donate money to school ship.org, schoolship.org,

Rebecca Hancock 21:19
that's where they go, and we will gladly take all your money, or if

Stuart Carlton 21:22
you want to advertise them, we don't have advertisers. But if you have a $2 million idea for advertising, a schooner idea,

Rebecca Hancock 21:33
well, you know, because there's the reason that, I'm sure you're probably aware, we just bought another vessel called the alliance. And you know, that was a direct result of more people wanting to get onto the vessel and experience our program than we had the time for,

Stuart Carlton 21:51
I believe it. I mean, yeah, even to get Renee and I on here, there was, like, two, two sailings or two segments to

Rebecca Hancock 21:58
like, you gotta show up where there was time wait to find out, and yeah, if the boat's full, so sorry, boats full. Sorry, but I'm glad you're here now. Yes,

Stuart Carlton 22:06
we're thrilled to be here.

Renie Miles 22:11
All right, let's go sailing on 3123, louder than

Izzy Cooper 22:22
ever. My name is Izzy Cooper. I'm the program coordinator at inland seas Education Association, and I am hanging out at our plankton station on board our ship today. So we had students who deployed a plankton net this morning over the side of the ship, and we took a sample. It filters through a significant amount of water, and then we get a concentrated sample that we then have the students come down and they learn about the different types of plankton in the water, phytoplankton and zooplankton. And then we will have them take little droplets, and we put those droplets underneath the microscope, and we try and find and identify different plankton that are in the water. So right here, we've got ourselves a kalanoid copepod, and its claim to fame is that it's just like the plankton in SpongeBob

Stuart Carlton 23:12
they were talking about. Yeah, certainly a SpongeBob expert, nor

Gillian Bucha 23:16
am I. So

Stuart Carlton 23:17
this one, so it looks like it's got two large antennae, and they're coming on antennae. What are those things? They are they're antenna. They're hair and not hairy, but they have little silly looking things on them. Yeah,

Izzy Cooper 23:27
they've got these little spiky things. And this one, what we're looking at, it looks like maybe one of the antenna has broken off, unfortunately, a little bit. But one of the easy ways to identify if it's male or female is, if it's a female, her two antenna are gonna be completely straight across, kind of like what's depicted in this picture. If it's a male, they're going to have a kink in one of their antennas, which is actually, if you ever watch SpongeBob, the plankton, is a man in that and he's got a kink in one of his antenna. And then we've got the singular eye right up here as well at the very top of the body. And then it's sort of just like long and skinny. And then at the bottom, you can kind of see we've got this. It almost looks like a tail here, if, if a female is pregnant, this is it. There's an egg sac at the bottom, so it's that's where she holds all of our eggs. And there are a number of different copepods. So we've got a kalanoid copepod. We've got a little nauplius copepod, no please, which are pretty cute. And then we've got a cycloped copepod. And those females, they have shorter antenna, but they have two egg sacs, which are

Speaker 1 24:30
kind of cool. Yeah, it's nice to meet the copepod family. Yeah, absolutely. And so what

Renie Miles 24:36
is, what is an in thing that looks like a thread here?

Izzy Cooper 24:39
This is probably like a little microfiber micro plastic, yeah. So we will a lot of the times they do come up in our plankton samples. We have other equipment on board that will trawl for specifically micro plastics, but it takes a long time. We don't do it in two hour programs, but yeah, that's what a lot of that is. And then a lot of this other stuff. Because, honestly, just scratches. But, yeah, we've got that. I'm just trying to see if we can find, like, I remember

Stuart Carlton 25:04
we said earlier. So what, what, what Izzy is doing is she's got the microscope, I've got the microphone to, like a TV, and so we're looking at this TV, and she's just scanning through, looking for, for different, lot of code. There's another one that's

Gillian Bucha 25:20
COVID, yeah, yeah,

Renie Miles 25:21
it looks like more micro

Izzy Cooper 25:24
plastic, micro plastics. And then we've got some of the green is probably just out algae that has come through. And we, oh, here's another here's another one. Um, the reason that we don't look directly into the microscope, yeah, if you're just looking straight down into like, a teeny, tiny, concentrated area. That's a no go for most people, but if you're at least looking at a screen, it's a little bigger. For some people. It doesn't really work to be down here, which is okay, we try and, like, make sure everybody can see at least one but our cap. I don't know if you've talked to Captain Lily yet, but she has a saying that there are three types of sailors you have, yeah, those who have gotten seasick, those are yet to get seasick, and liars. So I'm in the second camp. Knock on wood. Have yet to get seasick, but it's only you know. It's only a matter of time. So yeah, I'm gonna see if we

Renie Miles 26:12
can find the waters there,

Gillian Bucha 26:14
right? Yeah, but yeah,

Stuart Carlton 26:21
exactly, exactly, right, fantastic. So what is your one thing we're asking everybody well, so first of all, so you're a program coordinator, yeah, and so, so everybody's got these cool Ed titles. So what does a program coordinator coordinate? Is that just what do you do? I guess, yeah.

Izzy Cooper 26:39
So, honestly, I am sort of, I am the office dweller for the most part. So we are lucky and fortunate. Yeah, exactly. I'm not in the on the boat very often. We are lucky enough to enjoy a number of partnerships around the Great Lakes. And so all of the programming that we're currently doing here in Chicago is in partnership with the Chicago Yacht Club foundation. So I've been working with the foundation for the past six months to plan these programs and help plan the overnight programs that we're running with them as well. And then during the school year, we do K through 12 programming. We have about 120 schools that come through our programs. I'm the one communicating with those teachers and sort of getting people out on those programs and things like that. So lots of coordinating and logistics on the back end. And then this is the best perk of any job I've ever had, being able to be on a boat. So

Stuart Carlton 27:33
what is one thing? So you hope to see that, so it's cool to get to see this, right? But is there sort of one kind of take home that you're hoping to get out of the plankton experience, or is it just, hey, here's the stuff that's in our water. What are you hoping to get out of this?

Izzy Cooper 27:45
I think that our our hope is that regardless of where students are, what that at least one of the stations that they go to, something will stick with them, right? So understanding that there are things living in our waters, right in the Great Lakes and from fish, which is something that usually comes to mind, but as small as plankton, and just understanding the importance of plankton, without them, there are no other fish. There aren't birds like food. Birds don't have the right food source, all of those things. So plankton are the basis of the food web in the Great Lakes. So without them, things can't eat, and also, as one of our very brilliant students mentioned earlier, phytoplankton produce oxygen, and the phytoplankton in our waters produce 50% of the world's oxygen. Trees get all the credit, but phytoplankton are doing a lot of the heavy lifting, and so without them, even though, when you think of water, you don't really think of oxygen necessarily, like you don't breathe humans don't breathe underwater, but without the things living in the water, we on land are not breathing.

Speaker 2 28:48
So do they breathe in carbon? Yeah, so

Izzy Cooper 28:51
phytoplankton, photosynthesize, just like plants, just like plants on land, pretty much. So they are off putting oxygen as they're photosynthesizing to stay alive because they eat the sunlight.

Renie Miles 29:04
Yeah, that should be cool. I kind of respect them a little bit. Yeah,

Stuart Carlton 29:10
COVID, we're not saying you're right. Carolyn, we're not. So one thing we're asking to kind of wrap up is, there you go.

Unknown Speaker 29:21
That's pretty good record. What's one

Stuart Carlton 29:22
cool little Great Lakes factoid we want to share with our educated, enlightened, intelligent

Unknown Speaker 29:28
audience, a man. It's

Stuart Carlton 29:30
a great lakes factoid, a Great Lakes factoid. It's a great factoid about the Great Lakes.

Izzy Cooper 29:38
I feel like I usually what I go to is phytoplankton produces half of the world's like, I just learned something else today, but I can't remember what it is that's all I got. I'm sorry. I really am the office troll,

Stuart Carlton 29:54
okay, non phytoplankton only produced, like 50%

Izzy Cooper 29:58
of all toxins. I. Yeah, exactly, yeah. I

Renie Miles 30:05
guess I could ask the question I seem to be asking, which is, what, you know, what got you here

Izzy Cooper 30:09
in my seat? Yeah, what was your journey here? So I was born and raised in northern Michigan, so I've been connected to the Great Lakes my entire life. Grew up on the water, and feel like it's a really foundational part of who I am. And then I worked in summer camps for a long time as a camp director out of college for a number of years right on Lake Michigan, did some other things, and then moved back up to Traverse City, and was just fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time for this position, and I knew inland seas has such a great reputation in the community for the wonderful outreach and education that they do, and so I was lucky enough to be able to come on board, and it's just been a wonderful experience for me. I didn't know anything about plankton before I started working here, you know? And I'm like, Wow, that's so cool. Look at these different things in the water and the different watersheds and all of it. So it's just been wonderful to learn from so many brilliant people and and get to get to meet so many awesome and smart and excited young people too.

Rebecca Hancock 31:17
So you're asking me about seasickness, and it does happen. And when it comes to that, there are three types of people, people who have been seasick, people who have yet to be seasick, and liars.

Lily Haynes 31:41
My name is Lily Haynes, and I'm the captain of the sailing vessel inland seas.

Stuart Carlton 31:45
How does one become a captain? And then how did you become the captain of this boat, as opposed to any of the other dozens of boats that are out there?

Lily Haynes 31:52
Strictly speaking, to become a captain, you need to get a license from the Coast Guard. There's all kinds of various ways to go about getting what the Coast Guard wants you to have for your license. And different licenses, different scopes of licenses need different things. So for the license I have, which is 100 ton near coastal I had to spend 720 days working on boats that were about 75 tons or bigger. There's always there's four exams for your basic motorboat license, and then a sailboat is actually an endorsement on your license. So I five exams, and then there's a background check, written exams, or written exams, yeah, then you have to pass a physical. They have to make sure that you're not gonna have like, a stroke on the job. And you get a background check. And then we're all in a random drug testing program. I think the most fun part of it is you get to go find a notary and say an oath in front of them, oh, and have them sign it. But yeah, so you can do, you can do all of those things without going to school, which I think is actually pretty neat. I think a lot of people assume that you must have gone to college or, you know, gone through a more formal intensive training. I will also say, though, that it's much easier to get your captain's license than it is to become a captain. Become a captain, a competent captain of a boat. Yeah, yeah. That's just

Stuart Carlton 33:06
step one, right? That's just step one, although it's fair. I mean, two years on a two years on a boat is not unintensive, no,

Lily Haynes 33:11
yeah. Well, it depends on the boat that you're working on. And, you know, I

Stuart Carlton 33:16
mean, confidence, does that just come a time like just practice and I think it

Lily Haynes 33:20
come, it definitely comes with time. It also comes with good teachers, right? You know, you can work on a boat for four years and nobody can ever teach you anything, right? You pull on this, do that, right? And so I think it's a combination of finding good mentors and then kind of also wanting to learn.

Renie Miles 33:37
So, how did you come to inland seas? Um, well,

Lily Haynes 33:40
I came to inland seas, you know, about 10 years into my boating career. So I was actually working for a different boat in the same area that inland seas, dachshund and inland seas is in Sutton, Sutton Bay, Michigan, which is about 20 miles north of Traverse City. I was working on a boat in Traverse City that inland seas was actually chartering for spring field trips because they had so many and so I was exposed to inland seas that way. And that was the company, that company. While I was working for them, I was they helped me get my captain's license, and I started relief captaining. Inland seas was getting busier and busier, and busier. And so they started looking for a relief Captain as well. And so that allowed me to relief captain for both boats and have full time work in the summertime, driving boats instead of part time work, which was awesome, and it was a really easy, natural stepping stone, because I knew most of our educators already. I knew the program, the basic field, you know, program that we did from operating it on the other ship, Manitou. So I kind of started getting more and more involved as a relief captain with inland seas. And then they just this, just this last winter, they bought a second boat, which meant that they needed another full time captain. And I. I is probably the easiest job offer I've taken in my life. So

Stuart Carlton 35:04
tell us a little bit about the boat. So we're on her now. And this is the inland seas. Is the name of the boat, right? And so it's a schooner. What are the Do you know the SATs like size? And sure,

Lily Haynes 35:13
yeah, she's 77 feet long. Her displacement weight is 44 tons. Her beam is 16 feet, and she sleeps 16 people, 16

Stuart Carlton 35:25
people. Yeah, that's a Yeah, we were counting the beds, or whatever. They're not called beds. What are they called? Funks? Yeah, you can call them beds, though. That's all right, Stuart. You know what we're getting at anyway, yeah, that's amazing. And so is this like a large schooner, or, like an average sized one or a small one, I don't even know, average to small, okay, and it holds, I think 50 people. You said earlier, 45

Lily Haynes 35:46
is our legal capacity. Yeah, got it.

Stuart Carlton 35:49
That makes sense. And so you were telling us earlier, maybe repeat this. Why is it called a schooner? Nobody else knew, but the captain knew. Oh,

Lily Haynes 35:55
well, there's the really technical answer, which is that schooners have two or more masts, and on a two masted schooner, the sail in the back is the biggest. It's the main soul. It was called the biggest sail on the boat, the main sole. But you know, at least the story I was told was that the word schooner came from a Scottish word to scoon, which basically meant to skip lightly over the water.

Speaker 2 36:21
And is that what happens you guys skip lightly over the water?

Unknown Speaker 36:26
Yeah, I guess so.

Unknown Speaker 36:29
So how have you grown into the role of educator?

Lily Haynes 36:34
Because there is no school for traditional sailing vessels, which this boat would fall under the category of, so, you know, boats that are using old technology, essentially. And so we are, by nature, more or less trade schools, you know, or trade jobs, right? Where, where you have to have the people who are everything has to be taught on the job. And so therefore that is, that is part of what, you know, the mates position is, you talked to my mate, Rebecca, earlier. She's not, she's not just there to supervise that make sure everything happens, right? She's actually, she's also responsible for training everybody. So it's inherently an educator position. You know, I realized at some point that that was actually one of the things I liked best about traditional boats, was teaching both our crew, but also when passengers step on board a boat, or when kids step aboard a boat, they have questions, they want to know, things I've learned a lot, a whole lot from also watching our educators on the boat. You know, I'm I'm not a scientist, I'm not an I don't have an education background, per se. I've done a lot of educate educating people, but I don't have a formal education background. So I've learned just a, just a ton watching our staff and how they communicate with children. What's

Stuart Carlton 37:59
the secret to communicate with children. Think about that. If you had to summarize, like, what have you learned that's really been effective in terms of communicating this, this stuff with kids, many of whom were here because they're on a trip that they got pulled into, not necessarily because of something they really wanted to do, right, but, but so how do you how do you suck them

Lily Haynes 38:15
in? You know, I think a couple things you have to, like, engage their curiosity. And so, like, one of the things I've learned from our educators is that kids don't like to get questions wrong, so you don't ask them very specific things. You give them pretty like, either or choices. Like, do you think there's a little thinker? Well, float, you know, that's easy, right? You know, like, you don't, you don't have them searching for a technical word. You know, when a kid asks, you know, how the boat steers, for example, will compare the rudder to a fish's tail, right? You find something accessible. So I think, I think that's, that's pretty much the secret is to engage their curiosity and not really, like stifle it by throwing them into the deep end too fast and just engaging in concepts that are, like, you know, age appropriate. You know, the kids are generally surprisingly smart. Like, there's a lot that they can understand if you take the time to kind of get down to their level and and where they're starting from.

Renie Miles 39:15
Tell us a fun fact about the Great Lakes that that you'd like to share. It's

Stuart Carlton 39:21
a great lakes factoid, a Great Lakes factoid. It's a great factoid about the Great Lakes.

Lily Haynes 39:30
I don't know how fun it is, but I would like most more people on the Great Lakes to know that when a boat honks five times, it is not Hello

Stuart Carlton 39:42
five times. Oh, my goodness, help me, that's what

Lily Haynes 39:45
it is. No, it is, I do not understand your intentions. Oh, and generally it means, hey, what are you doing? It is, it is. It's actually officially known as the danger. So. No danger signal,

Stuart Carlton 40:00
yeah. How often have you heard the danger signal before? Oh,

Lily Haynes 40:03
I have, over the weekend with the the busy traffic in Chicago, the danger signal was a I sent the danger signal

Stuart Carlton 40:13
like waving, yeah,

Lily Haynes 40:17
I hear the other commercial boats give the danger signal every once in a while, but, yeah, I mean, the way I think about it, right, is like I'm getting their attention one way or another, because my big fear is that they're just not paying attention at all. Yeah, regardless of whether they even know the meaning of the five right, or if they know what they're supposed to do, if they know that, they're the giveaway, that's all, yeah. Do

Stuart Carlton 40:37
you have torpedoes? Honestly, we do not. Okay, no. I mean secret ones. Yep, that could not have been any better. Oh, my goodness, that was a dangerous thing. There was a one of the water taxis giving out a danger signal. They don't know what our intentions are.

Unknown Speaker 40:56
They weren't giving it to us.

Stuart Carlton 41:00
We're nowhere near we're at dock, beautifully docked ship, yes,

Renie Miles 41:04
as are all the other boats around it. Yeah,

Stuart Carlton 41:08
oh, you know why? Because these two boats are about to crash. Yeah, you see that one's turning and then right there is another boat. Yep, somebody is not fully obeying the rules of the road here. Yeah, they should have, maybe they only did 719, days on it. Yeah, no kidding. Well, thank you so much. Thank you. All right, sorry. This is for what, again, this is for teach me about the Great Lakes, a twice monthly podcast in which I A Great Lakes conference. People are hurt smarter and harder working, and teach me all about Great Lakes. It's what we do. It's just an outreach thing we do. It super fun. I love podcasts.

Julian illisic 41:42
My name is Julian illisic, and I'm the associate director and an educator with inland seas Education Association.

Unknown Speaker 41:55
Tell us about what you do, sure.

Julian illisic 41:57
So my role has many facets to it. I would say the overarching umbrella is kind of like making sure all of our pieces are running. So I teach on the ship. I help do some of the logistics for our programs. I do grant writing and fund development, and also oversee a lot of our staff.

Stuart Carlton 42:16
That's that sounds really that's a lot. I'm blown away by how everybody I guess this is how it has to be. But with the organization, everybody has a lot of hats they wear. We do a lot of little things because we do. You may have two two boats. It's still kind of a shoestring thing, isn't it, in terms of just

Julian illisic 42:32
it is, yeah. So each of our staff members wears many hats within the organization, and we also have a really great group of 80 to 100 volunteers who help out. And so Brad, who is a deckhand today, is a volunteer. And oftentimes we have instructors who are volunteers, but they spend so much time training to become crew members, to become instructors with our programs, and they help us do ship maintenance and office work. So we're really supported by a huge group of volunteers on top of a staff of about 11.

Renie Miles 43:01
So I'm curious, how did inland seas, the whole concept get get started like and the support behind it?

Julian illisic 43:10
Yeah, great question. So our founder's name is Tom Kelly, and he was a great lake scientist, and he spent time working on a ship called the clear water, which is out on the Hudson River. And so they do a similar program where they do environmental advocacy on the Hudson River. And he worked on that boat, and he said, We need one of these in the Great Lakes. We need to have a program that takes kids out and takes people out onto the Great Lakes on a boat to learn about the Great Lakes from being on a boat on the water. And so he founded inland seas in 1989 and it was successful. After a couple years, he leased a couple different ships and decided we need our own boat. And so the ship that we're on right now inland seas was built specifically for our organization, really. So this boat has been with us since 1994 it was built to the specs that he knew we needed for being able to do science on board with kids. It's a really stable platform, so it's not too rocky. We have our lab below deck, and from there, it just kind of grew. So we had school groups coming out with us in the spring and the fall, and then over the years, we've grown to be going to different ports throughout the summer. So it was really his vision and dream to have this program on the Great Lakes that brought it here. That's

Renie Miles 44:26
great. And so how do you guys decide where you're gonna go in a given year?

Julian illisic 44:30
Yeah, so as we're growing our partners, it's become hard and harder and harder to decide where we are, because everyone wants us working with them, but that's what a lot of our winter months are spent doing. And so we have certain audiences that we want to reach. And so during the summer, we go to places where folks aren't necessarily able to get to us, so whether it's far away in the Upper Peninsula or Detroit or Chicago, and so we can bring our platform to them. And so we connect with different partners, whether it's through University. Partnerships or different youth organizations, and we work with them throughout the winter to figure out what fits into our schedule, logistically and fits in with their schedule. And so it's a lot of communication and partnership and relationship building to figure out what that summer schedule looks like. And

Stuart Carlton 45:16
it's stuff that's largely funded through donations and things like that. Because, I mean, it's the logistics are impressive, but I you know both, both a chief, right? Yeah, bust out another 1000 cheapest

Unknown Speaker 45:27
form of environmental education, yeah,

Stuart Carlton 45:29
yeah, exactly. So, so do I have to work with? Is it corporate partners or private donations or whatever? Yeah, so

Julian illisic 45:35
it's a combination. So we're about a third grant funded, and those are anywhere from grants through NOAA to family foundations. It's about a third individual donors, so private donations, and then we do have some earned revenue through ticket sales on some of our public sales that we offer for families up north. So it's a combination of funding sources, but lots of grant writing, lots of foundation relationship building.

Renie Miles 45:59
And how do you bring the kids to the to the to the ship? How does that come to pass? Yeah, so we

Julian illisic 46:07
work a lot with teachers who bring their classrooms to us in the spring and the fall. And so they bus up to our campus in Sutton Bay. And then when we come to away ports, we typically are partnering with someone who connects with those youth organizations to bring them to the ship. And so again, it's back to that whole relationship building, and they help us make the connection to get the participants on the boat. So one

Stuart Carlton 46:31
thing we can't help but notice is that it's basically an all female crew here, which is awesome and worth noting. I think, although someone else was saying, we can't wait until it's not awesome and worth noting, it just is. Awesome and worth noting. It just definitely Yeah, is that just how it sort of has evolved over time?

Julian illisic 46:48
So it's, it's how it has evolved over time, and it is, you are seeing a handful of the bigger crew that we have. And so we had Captain Lilly with us today. We also have another full time captain, Captain Ben. And so on any given day, it could be either Lily or Ben. And then our crew ranges, we have men and women who help us crew where we do put some intention into it is when we do our overnight programs with young women. We really think it's important to have that female leadership on board, both so that they can connect with the leadership, but also just seeing yourself represented in roles that are traditionally male. And so when we do, for instance, the overnight with young women from Chicago going back to Sutton's Bay, we'll have an all female crew on board for that. And so that's when we put a little more intention into who do we have as representation for them? But on any given day, it can be a mix of men and women as part of our crew. But you're right that today was largely female dominated. So when

Stuart Carlton 47:51
you're talking about expanding people's just world views overall, because all the point is, you're getting people who may not be on a boat like this, right, or they were saying earlier, they may not even fully understand there's a lake here. I know my kids don't, even though we come up once or twice a year, it's like still trying to really comprehend what that means. That's hard, but then to see also an expansive definition of who can be what type of role. I think it's really, really, really important. So that's really awesome that you do. Yeah,

Julian illisic 48:14
and I think one of the neatest things about how we do education is it's one thing to learn about the lake and about aquatic ecology when you're in a classroom on shore, but to really be out on the lake and taking samples that day and saying, we might get something, we might not get something. But this is what's happening in the lake right now, at this moment, I think there's something really powerful to that. And so the students are able to use that scientific equipment. They're able to take those samples that day from the water, and the other component of it is wanting them to have a positive connection to the lake. Our whole ethos is you're going to protect what you love, and to love something, you have to have experience with it. And so if we're giving them that positive experience out on the water, they're going to have that really memorable time out there. And hopefully that will help be a touch point for creating that connection to the Great Lakes. Nice.

Renie Miles 49:04
Do? This sounds like a dry question, but do you guys do like, like evaluation kind of stuff to kind of get a handle on how that goes? We

Julian illisic 49:12
do, yep, so we survey the teachers who bring their classrooms out about the experience, and you know they're with their students doing more classroom extension after the field trip, back in the classroom, so we can hear from them. For our participants in the overnight trips, they all fill out surveys. And so we're always, always doing evaluation of how we can improve our programs. We debrief as a staff about what are things that went well, what are things that didn't go well. So every year we're trying to improve upon it, and you

Renie Miles 49:41
get some really, really nice stories about the kids and the excitement that they had and what they learned, and blah, blah, blah, yeah,

Julian illisic 49:48
I think one of the best parts for me, we get a lot of thank you notes from kids, and they'll draw pictures of the ship, and they'll put the little microscope on there, and it's always really, it's telling it's almost a form of evaluation in itself. To see. What do they remember? What are they drawing on there? Some of them will make a big goby on the front. Others will really focus in on the wheel and have, like, a big wheel on the front of the thank you note. And so those are always very cute to get back and kind of hear what their memories are from the field trip in their in their thank you notes. See, I'll

Stuart Carlton 50:18
do a lot of education, but at least when I've worked with kids, is you end up learning stuff too. Is there something that, like you've learned through this process, either about yourself or the lakes or education, that it might be kind of interesting to talk about?

Julian illisic 50:29
Yeah, I think for me, it's the power of a hands on experience. I think you can't replicate that in a classroom, and so having the kids be able to, you know, when we take a benthos sample from the bottom, like touch the mud, or hold around Goby, or see those plankton swimming around under the microscope. Like those, those key moments are really what's going to spark that curiosity and that interest. And that's been my biggest takeaway. I love seeing them get excited. It makes me excited, even though I see this stuff every day. And so I think getting those place based hands on experiences is, I think, a really great way to connect people to the lakes and to science and to let them know it's something that's accessible. I think field work is so important and good and a fun piece of science that they don't always get in school. So I love being able to provide that for them. Well,

Stuart Carlton 51:21
so Julian and Lissa, thank you so much for inviting us on this boat. This has been amazing. I'd actually not been out in the Great Lakes that much on a boat, because I don't make boat money. I'm not going to lie. I know what I make, and it make boat money. But that's not the actual reason that I drove up here from West Lafayette and the Renee came taking the Brown Line, Renee not riding the brown line just to get on a boat. Renee is riding the Brown Line to ask you two questions. And the first one is this, if you could have a great donut for breakfast or a great sandwich for lunch, which would you have?

Julian illisic 51:52
Definitely sandwich for lunch. For lunch, much more of a savory gal. Much

Stuart Carlton 51:56
more of a savory gal. And so when we go up to wherever you are, near Grand not Grand Rapids. What's the other one? Traverse City. I've got Traverse City bourbon in my basement. You think I wouldn't anyway, the point is this, I'm going to Traverse City. I'm gonna that afternoon, I will have a bourbon, but before then, I want a nice full stomach so that I can have two bourbons without it being an issue. Where should I go to get a really great sandwich? So

Julian illisic 52:18
I would suggest you go to Leland. And there's an old fishing town called Fishtown in Leland. And in Fishtown is the village cheese shanty, and they have delightful sandwiches. I'd say the most common is in North Shore. It's got herbed mayo on it. It's got turkey and bacon. I think you'd like it.

Stuart Carlton 52:35
That's excellent. And so our normal second question, we're not going to ask you, because the most special place to be on the Great Lakes is right here. That's right, right on our scooter. But we are gonna ask this, which is, we're asking everybody who we remember, which is a solid 80% of the people we've talked to, what's like, one cool Great Lakes little factoid that you have to share with our audience, Great Lakes. Wide audience made up of movers, shakers. It's a great lakes factoid, a Great Lakes factoid. It's a great factoid about the Great Lakes.

Julian illisic 53:05
I think I might get this number wrong, but the fact that there's over 35,000 islands within the Great Lakes blows my mind. And I love visiting the islands that have communities on them and the ones that are national parks and hiking on them. And I just think they're so unique to our lakes. And there's not, you know, the Great Lakes are so big, and so to have that many islands in the lakes, I think helps with the scale of them, and kind of picturing, you know, how much water is out there, to have 35,000 islands.

Stuart Carlton 53:36
So we have Julian back. The question we've been asking everybody, is, is there like a cool Great Lakes little factoid that you would like to share with our educated, good looking audience? Yes, 1000s of listeners,

Gillian Bucha 53:48
so many. Full disclosure, I went to graduate school at University of Minnesota, Duluth, Large Lakes Observatory, so I studied the Great Lakes at a graduate level. There

Stuart Carlton 53:58
we go. Let me sit down. Yeah, all right. Factoid, we're gonna go, we're gonna go, top three factoids. Then, oh, top

Unknown Speaker 54:05
three. Okay, first, it's

Stuart Carlton 54:07
a great lakes factoid, a Great Lakes factoid, it's a great factoid about the Great Lakes. My

Gillian Bucha 54:15
favorite organisms in the lake, okay, are called diatoms. Diatoms. They're so tiny we can't see them on our setup here on the ship, but they, most of them, are photosynthetic, so like the algaes, but they're their own diet.

Stuart Carlton 54:30
Means to what's the two?

Gillian Bucha 54:31
Yeah, so I'm not sure about the like, you know, the Latin origins of that. But the cool thing about them is that they, instead of making their cell walls soft and gooey, like they're hard and rigid, and they make them out of silica. So essentially, they're little plants that have their own little glass house around them. They have really cool structures and shapes to them. So they like pull the silica out of the water, and they make their cell wall out of silica. A glass, and at the end of their life, you know, they have to kind of actively keep themselves up in the water the end of their life that sinks to the bottom. But it's glass, so it really doesn't degrade that fast. And if you take a core sample of a lake, the mud down at the bottom, you can go through on a microscope and look through all the diatoms, dead diatom house, all these, like layers. And if you, if you have a long enough core, got all these layers, and you basically go back through time, and you can see if the diatom population has shifted

Stuart Carlton 55:37
also, it's like the ice core. Oh, it's a little bit, yes, yeah. Well, not living, I guess, dead history, yeah. So

Gillian Bucha 55:42
it's this, like fossil record, and you can use it. And, you know, modern diatoms, they know what their preferences are, whether it was like, super rainy or really dry or kind of salty or really fresh. They all have preferences to them. And you can use that to go back in, you know, way into the past and make educated guesses about what the climate was in that region. So here in North America, the Laurentian Great Lakes, scientists used that to figure out what was happening since the last ice age and beyond. And then in other parts of the world, so the rift lakes of East Africa, there are seven Great Lakes over there, they did not, they were not covered by ice during the ice age. So those lakes have a sediment record that go back, like 25 million years. Yes, you can do the whole time period. Maybe

Stuart Carlton 56:33
you don't know this, yeah, how long of an ice core sample or not, ice mud sample, sample would you need? Like, how deep down do I have to go to go 25 million years if I'm on one of the African in

Gillian Bucha 56:43
those like it depends on how much sediment is accumulating each year. Every Lake is different. I mean, those cores, we're talking like hundreds of meters of core brought up. And there's a fun place in Minnesota called lack core, and it's the largest lacustrine core repository, French for the core, yeah, at least in North America, but I think around the world. And when you go and spend all this money to pull that mud out, bring it back, and then it lives forever in a repository as the scientists sample it further and further. So that was my first favorite fact. Yeah, that is two,

Stuart Carlton 57:25
if you want to bite size, but that's all right, this is good. All right. Factoid number one, any of those that you want? No, no, I want more. What else give you another Great Lakes factoid, another great

Unknown Speaker 57:34
lakes factoid. It's

Stuart Carlton 57:36
a great lakes factoid, a Great Lakes factoid, it's a great factoid about the Great Lakes,

Gillian Bucha 57:44
is that, at least here in the Five Great Lakes, Lake Superior has a different formation history than the other great lakes. It was part of a rift in the mid a mid continent rift. It was one arm of the Rift, so it has a volcanic history. And you know, the lakes are just forming where the depressions on the earth are, right? Same with ice, they flow to the lowest point on the earth. So yes, there were glaciers that kind of carved out all five of the Great Lakes. However, there was a valley up there in Lake Superior, because there was a giant rift. Lots of volcanism happens up there. So all the rocks around Lake Superior are volcanic rocks, and they it's very different from here Lake Michigan, which is all like limestone, sedimentary rocks. It's got a whole different history up there.

Renie Miles 58:37
What makes it so deep? Yes, right,

Gillian Bucha 58:40
yeah, because it was actively rifting apart in a big valley. Connect that to my other favorite fact, which is that the Great Lakes in Africa and the whole eastern side of the continent, those are all rift lakes, so, and that's still an active rift. So there's active volcanism happening on those lakes. The continent is splitting off right here. Not only

Stuart Carlton 59:02
these, I know these amazing factoids, but you're connecting them professionally. All right, let's bring it home. One more factoid. This is good. It's a great lakes factoid, a Great Lakes factoid. It's a great factoid about the Great Lakes.

Gillian Bucha 59:18
Well, just a personal one. We traveled 260 miles to get here with a group of eight students, and we are still on the same lake, and we still drink, or drinking the same water like so up where we live in northern Michigan is still Lake Michigan. We traveled five days to bring

Stuart Carlton 59:35
water, right? Yes, when you say you're being metaphorical, when you're saying we're drinking, you're not leaning over

Gillian Bucha 59:41
well. But however, I mean, the water that we fill up with that was pulled through a treatment facility, out of the Great Lakes treatment facilities we fill up here. So I mean, we are drinking lake water and that, and that's true Up Where We Live as well. So yeah, 260 miles, we're still on the same lake. I.

Stuart Carlton 1:00:09
Anyway, that was really great time. Like I said, if you can get on a boat, you get on a boat. That was really cool. It's really neat what they're doing. It's very similar to sea grants missions, mission in a lot of ways, and that they're out there helping educate youth and pull them in, but to have something like a ship to attract the youth, it's pretty fun. And I mean, I got to go scooting. I never scooned, so I'm always happy to do a little bit of scooting.

Teach me about the Great Lakes. Is brought to you by the fine people at Illinois, Indiana, Sea Grant. We encourage you to check out the cool stuff we do. At i i Sea grant.org or at i l i n Sea Grant on Facebook, Twitter and other social media, maybe Instagram. I don't think we're threading it. We could threat we're not currently. Teach me about the Great Lakes is produced by hope charters, Megan Gunn and Renee miles. Our senior producers, Carolyn Foley and Ethan Chitty is our associate producer and our fixer. Our super fun podcast artwork is by Joel Davenport. JD, the show is edited by the awesome Quinn rose. QR, and we thank her for everything. If you have a comment about the show or a question, send us an email, teach me about the Great lakes@gmail.com or leave a message on our hotline, 765, 496, I ISG, that's Illinois, Indiana Sea Grant, 496, 4474 you can also follow the show on Twitter at Teach Great Lakes, but like a microfiber and a plankton sample, it's not really clear if we belong there. But Hey everybody, thanks so much for listening and keep grading those links.

I don't know. I mean the horns fairly loud. I'm just gonna turn these all different volume levels, and then one of them will not get blown out. I think we're good, all right. Horn, horn, Oh, baby, yes, score. I.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai