Hi, my name is Ella. I've been volunteering with LAMI for about two years now. I started as a camper, and since then, I've worked my way up to become a deckhand, and now I've been accepted to Cal Maritime, and I hope to study Marine Transportation at their program. An important part of the Los Angeles Maritime institute's mission is inspiring maritime and STEM career paths. Ella is our latest example of mission
accomplished. Now let's learn a little bit more about her journey. My name is Rachel
le and I'm Ella's mom. I grew up on some islands up in Washington, north of Puget Sound, and so, before the pandemic, we'd visit every summer. When the pandemic hit obviously everything changed, and we couldn't keep going to the islands where I grew up, so my husband and I decided once we were able to get
everybody vaccinated and stuff like that that we needed to get Ella somehow out on the water, both to get her away from the Wi-Fi a little bit and to get her back to the thing that we knew she
loved, which involved boats and sailing. I didn't get to do a lot of boating with her other than in the little tiny row boat we had but I knew how much she missed it as we moved through the pandemic, so as soon as we could get her out on some boats we figured out that LAMI was here and that they had a youth program, and we got her involved, and she fell in love instantly with the tall ships and being involved with the people that are a part of LAMI as well as being out on the water, and I think
getting away from Wi-Fi was really good for her too. I've been on boats before, but my first experience with LAMI was really special because specifically there was a crew member on board who helped me
feel involved in sailing, where before on ferry rides or row boating, stuff like that, it's less hands on, where you're not going around doing something complicated, yet still, you're still sailing, you're still on the water, you're still involved in moving a large boat to places you've possibly
never been before so LAMI really helped me focus on the
maritime industry, what I now want to go into, where had I not started with LAMI, I never would have had those hands to help guide me somewhere. One of my favorite things about being on the boat is surprisingly cooking, and I'll explain why. Cooking is just, it's a bonding activity. One of my experiences at my first camp week as well as later camp weeks is gathering around the galley. There's the floor of the kitchen, the galley, is sunk b
elow the deck, so you're able to kind of squat next to some of the windows in that cabin house and talk to the people who are cooking inside and so, one of my favorite things to do when I wasn't on the cooking watch would be just to sit there with whoever's cooking and talk with them, and get to know them, joke with them. For my Eagle Scout project, while I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do for it, I reached out to LAMI to see if there were any projects here that needed to be done, an
d I talked to Jacob, who's the manager of Building G, as well as the person to talk to if you want to, if any of these boats need to be repaired, and he brought up climbing aloft, and needing a better way to train crew members who need to go aloft. It's quite high up as you can see, and so going that far up is kind of scary. You are clipped in, it is safe it's just not necessarily the most comfortable place to be, and especially when you're in a learning environment, that's not conducive to lear
ning, so through discussions with Jacob, I have created the Eagle Scout project plan, which is to create a replica of our yards, the wooden things that hold the sails up there. It's going to hopefully hang in Building G. It's going to help with training, and with even helping youth participants get to know how furling works, which is folding the sail up to put it away, so that it's not going to blow about when we're at dock or at anchor and need it to stay put. Being involved with LAMI, first as
a camper and then a deckhand has inspired me to become, to go into a maritime career, which I'm really excited about! [Music]
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