By T.S. Mills-Faraudo, STAFF WRITER
Inside Bay Area
Friday, November 11, 2005
REDWOOD CITY -- Wet, gooey, adventurous, muddy.
Those were just a few words Hoover Elementary School students used to describe their canoe Thursday trip to Bair Island with Save The Bay, an organization focused on protecting and restoring the San Francisco Bay
.
A group of 23 seventh- and eighth-graders from the school paddled from the Marine Science Institute in Redwood City to Bair Island, where they learned about sea life, birds and the ecology of the Bay.
After a two-and-a-half-hour-long canoe trip, the students returned slightly wet, with mud smeared on their clothes.
At one point during the trip, two canoes got stuck in the mud because the tide was receding fast. Students had to move into the other canoes while Save The Bay field educators pulled the craft from the mud.
Nonetheless, the students appeared elated when they returned from the trip.
"I really liked the paddling. It was good exercise, and we got to splash around," said eighth grader Siboney Renteria, 13. "I also liked searching for plankton in the mud."
For seventh-grader Christy Tashiro, 13, analyzing the mud was the best part of the trip.
"You can take a cupful of mud out of the Bay and find at least 10 living organisms in it," she said.
Not only did the students learn about the ecology of the Bay, they also learned about teamwork and communication, said Save The Bay field educator Kathy Hilimire. The students had to learn how to paddle the canoes insync, and they all worked to clean and put away the canoes when they returned.
"The most important thing to me is that they have a good day," Hilimire said. "For some of these kids, it's their first experience on the Bay."
Maxygen, Inc., a biotechnology company headquartered in Redwood City, partnered with Save the Bay to pay for Hoover's canoe trip.
To make the program accessible to all students, Save The Bay offers sliding-scale pricing, determined by the percentage of students at a school who are eligible for the federal free and reduced lunch program.
Save The Bay brings more than 5,000 students a year in the Bay Area on its Canoes In Sloughs trips. Last month, Save The Bay's Watershed Education programs received an award at the State of the San Francisco Estuary Conference.
"We're trying to create a connection between them (the students) and the bay," said Save The Bay spokeswoman Desire Aquino.
Staff writer T.S. Mills-Faraudo covers education. She can be reached at (650) 348-4338 or tmills@sanmateocountytimes.com.
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