Sea Scouts

In addition to the Boy Scouts Troop at CtR, there also is a High Adventure unit here for older youths called Sea Scouts. This group is for youths 14-20 who want to participate in activities on and off the water. The two units both follow the Scout Law and the Scout Oath to create good citizens and cultivate leadership development, as they both are under the umbrella of the Boy Scouts of America.

In Scouts BSA, units are called troops; in Sea Scouts, units are called ships. The new CtR Sea Scout unit is Ship 502, an award-winning unit that recently moved from the Red Wolf District to CtR in Big Cypress District. The ship also has a nickname, the Sea Scout Ship Invincible, named after one of the ships in the Nation of Texas Fleet.

Ship 502 has a 34-foot Hunter sailboat on which youths learn how to sail, tie knots with rope (called marlinspike), and are taught how to navigate. The youth also use kayaks and canoes on area bodies of salt- and freshwater and have campouts on land with tents. The Ship 502 sailboat is housed at a slip at the Seabrook Marina and Seabrook, Texas, and sails in Clear Lake and Galveston Bay. Troop 573 is not coed, but the Sea Scout Ship does have males and females because Sea Scouts has been coed since 1969. Scouts can be members of each CtR unit separately or both simultaneously.

Ship 502 meets from 7-8:30 p.m. each Monday at CtR. For more information, contact [email protected].

When Jewell Norris received a phone call from a number she didn’t recognize, she got so excited she forgot to answer it.

She knew Cassidy Christian, the national Sea Scouts boatswain at the time, would be calling her successor the weekend that Jewell was at an outdoor leadership training camp. When there was a break in the training, she called the number back, and it was indeed Cassidy, who delivered the news that Jewell had been selected to be the 2022-23 national boatswain.

“Instantly, I had so many ideas running through my head,” Jewell says. “I started a note on my phone and wrote down anything and everything that came to mind. When I got home after camp, I was on fire to start planning what my term would look like.”

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