Summer may seem a long way off, but the Parks and Recreation Commission is looking ahead to warmer months as it begins to plan for sailing and other programming at the town beach.
Swimming and boating lessons have been offered at Bare Hill Pond for years, but the pandemic changed that last summer. Health and safety regulations meant that swimming and boating lessons were not offered, and swimming was not allowed. Although COVID-19 is still a threat, Parks and Rec is hoping the town will be able to have this programming in some capacity this year. Parks and Rec Chair Bob O’Shea told the Press this will likely mean that swimming (including lifeguard protection) and swimming lessons won’t be possible, but the town will offer boat rentals and lessons again.
If offered as planned, boating lessons, like most things during the pandemic, will not operate in the usual way. Normally beach staff would sit in a boat with a couple of students to better instruct them and offer assistance as needed. However, O’Shea said, to maintain proper social distancing, instructors will likely have to be in a separate boat alongside a student instead.
Despite the probable changes to the boating lessons program, O’Shea said the town would offer instruction for the usual categories: sailing, canoeing, and kayak-ing. In addition to lessons for children, Parks and Rec is considering offering adult boating lessons as well.
In preparation for boating, the commission recently purchased three new sailboats to add to the fleet of six Sunfish the town currently owns. There used to be nine Sunfish, but their fiberglass structure makes them fragile, and repetitive damage over the years drove three into disuse, O’Shea explained. The new sailboats are made by the same company that produces Sunfish boats, LaserPerformance, but are a different model called Pico.
New boats were not the original plan but occurred as a result of an earlier purchase that proved unworkable. Recently, MIT was selling some of its old sailboats, and the town used the money from the rental kiosk to purchase four of the boats for $5,000 total. O’Shea said the commission members soon realized that this style of sailboat, a boat designed by MIT called a “Tech Dinghy,” is much larger and more complicated than a Sunfish. He said, “The deep hull and daggerboard would have been hard to sail except in the deeper water, and the [Tech Dinghies] would have been too much for the kids to learn.”
So Parks and Rec decided to sell the boats to the Marblehead Yacht Club. The club offered more than double what the town had paid for MIT’s sailboats, O’Shea said, and the commission used those funds to purchase the brand new Pico sailboats instead, which cost roughly $3,600 each.
The Pico sailboats have several unique features that make them better than the Sunfish, O’Shea said. He explained that one of the biggest sources of damage with the town’s older sailboats is that the fiberglass hulls and daggerboards––the removable boards that serve as the keel of small sailboats––are easily cracked and expensive to repair. The Pico model, however, has a hard plastic hull and an aluminum daggerboard, making it much more durable. Because the durability of these sailboats will make maintenance easier, O’Shea added, they will be available to rent for outings from the kiosk when not in use for lessons. The town did not allow rental of the Sunfish boats this past summer due to concerns about their fragility.
Moreover, the boats are also self-bailing, so any water trapped in the cockpit is drained while the boat is moving, O’Shea said. They are also slightly bigger, and the boom, or metal pole attached to the bottom of the mainsail, is higher up the mast so boaters have more room and don’t have to duck as low when turning.
O’Shea added that the Pico sailboats have two sails instead of one, the mainsail and the jib. The mainsail on this model has special features, such as the ability to reef the sail––folding or rolling the mainsail to reduce its size and better control the boat in strong winds––and the addition of a boom vang––an extra rope system used to control the shape of the mainsail. “This will give students a more realistic sailing experience than [they get from a] Sunfish … I hope we can upgrade all the Sunfish to something like this as they die off,” O’Shea later wrote to the Press.
