Sound School Saves A Sharpie — & An Oyster Reef

As a student at the Sound School in the 1980s, Neil Geist helped to build a full-size model of the historic New Haven oyster boat, a 35-foot sharpie called Tenacious.

The Tenacious was so perfect and sailed so well the folks at Mystic Aquarium wanted to exhibit her. But the sea gods were not as protective on land. En route the boat slipped off the trailer, on I‑95, and broke in half.

But the story is going to have a happy ending.

That’s because students along with Geist, now a long-time teacher at the Sound School and its most experienced boat-builder, are rehabbing Tenacious to sail again.

Her expected launch this fall, with the help of another recently launched venture, The Sound School New Haven Harbor Foundation, is striving to put environmental stewardship of the harbor and its oyster culture on the map, along with maritime preservation, and an infusion of civic pride in New Haven’s maritime traditions more front and center in the Elm City civic life. 

Wednesday night all that was on display at the school’s sprawling and stunning harbor-side campus in City Point as 75 Sound School guests and supporters toured the boat building shop, the fish lab, and the school’s other facilities.

They also heard students like Anja Nikkel and Brendan Conners present their projects, organized, professional scientific findings, on how to restore an oyster reef – all part of a festive coming out party for the recently re-launched foundation.

Geist and his students eventually rebuilt the broken Tenacious and sailed her for many aquaculture and maritime adventures in the semesters that followed — the Sound School and its 330 students, 60 percent from New Haven and 40 percent from towns as far away as Old Saybrook, is the largest aquaculture vocational high school in the state and one of New Haven’s several unappreciated true treasures.

Over the decades many other smaller sharpies, usually 16-footers, were built as part of the kids’ hands-on experiential education, but by 2015 Tenacious once again had fallen into disrepair, her pearly light blue paint all but chipped away, her cleats too loose for use and enough rot throughout so that all the decking has had to be replaced.

Enter the Sound School New Haven Harbor Foundation established in 2018 by lovers of the school and its mission, like Sound School retired history teacher (and current sailing coach) John Buell who now helms it. 

After a shut down through much of the pandemic when the school was closed, funds have now been raised for wood and new sails but at least another $5,000 to go, Buell said, for paint, adhesives, and other supplies and equipment.

Other critical aims of the foundation, said the School Principal Marc Potocksy, are to make funds available on an emergency basis when, for example, a pump in the school’s extensive fish lab goes out.

While the Board of Ed eventually does come through for a wide range of support, ​“That’s a 24-hour emergency,” Potocksy said, that must be rectified immediately.

What’s at stake, for example, are the fascinating lobster ​“condos,” as the under-water cone-like apparatus is colloquially called, where lobster hatchlings reside. 

In the lab, with a dozen tanks full of Cobia, sea horses and worm fish, and the school’s signature blue lobsters (manipulating the diet around the chemical astaxanthin causes the color effect) students like Ethan Reynolds, who comes in all the way from Durham, learn aquaculture, environmental management, maritime engineering and host of other skills.

In the evening’s culminating presentation, students, teachers, and supporters, bearing plates of large Eastern Oysters, of the kind that have been harvested in adjacent waters for 150 years, along with sandwiches and pizza, gathered in the campus’s original boat shop. There seniors Anja Nikkel and Brendan Conners described the ongoing school-wide restoration of an oyster reef habitat in Long Island Sound a hundred meters from the school’s docks.

In its heyday as an oyster capital of the world from about 1820 to 1910, oysters used to cover the bottom of the harbor. But through neglect, most of that is now mud and sludge and there is nothing for the oysters to cling to, which they need to survive. So the students and staff, over several years, with grants from Yale and other small private donations, are deploying RBMs, reef ball modules, made of cement with oyster shell additive to support a restoration of habitat.

And it’s working. 

“The bottom used to be full of oysters but not now,” said Conners, who graduates this year and goes on to the University of Alabama. ​“Our oyster reef is a (marine) oasis.”

His colleague in the presentation, Anja Nikkel, added: ​“If you build it, they will come, and habitat biodiversity will grow.”

Those wishing to learn more or to support the work are encouraged to go to the site, or email: [email protected]