Earlier this summer, Rippleffect offered 16 teens a week on Cow Island to learn sea-kayaking skills and island geology, swim and hike. Rippleffect and the Parkside Community Policing Project in Portland sponsored the program. Using kayaks as educational tools and Casco Bay as a classroom, the week-long adventure marked one of the highlights of the opening season of Rippleffect’s Cow Island Ocean Academy.
Officers from the community-policing project also volunteered to work with the participants. In addition to learning kayaking and other recreational skills, the teens studied tidepools and worked with local lobstermen.
For Regan, the start-up of the youth programs is the fulfillment of a long-time dream. In 1999, he led a 2700-mile kayaking expedition to pay homage to the lives of several young people he knew who had died of AIDS and to educate teens about the disease. The team set out from Lubec, Maine and completed the journey in Key West, Florida. Along the way, the kayakers spoke to 2,300 youths about the importance of taking acceptable versus unacceptable risks in their daily lives. Having lost friends to AIDS, Regan used the metaphor of the risks inherent in kayaking to the risks teens face from AIDS.
“All youth are at risk—some more at risk—and these kids face serious consequences resulting from inappropriate, poorly advised choices,” Regan told me.
After completing their journey, Regan and expedition team member Aaron Frederick, inspired by their youth contacts, brought Rippleffect back to Maine. “It was bittersweet, the experience of making contact with these kids, introducing them to kayaking and then having to leave. We needed something that would continue and to create an affordable and accessible opportunity.”
Regan added that developing the program in Maine was his way of giving back to the community where he was raised and honoring his friends who died of AIDS, in particular, a childhood friend who had helped him through troubled times and inspired his love for Casco Bay.
“Having grown up in Cape Elizabeth without means, I was fortunate to have friends who introduced me to the Bay,” Regan said.
Future plans for the Cow Island Ocean Academy include an arts center, theater, classrooms (both indoor and outdoor) and summer office space. For more information go to www.rippleffect.net.

Theresa Torrent-Ellis is the outreach coordinator for the Maine Coastal Program, Maine State Planning Office.