Ursuline STEM students engineer sails for Haiti

(Photos courtesy of Ursuline Academy)

By BETH DONZE
Clarion Herald

On past visits to Nicaragua and Guyana, Kevin Gunn was stunned by the endless streams of plastic waste sullying shorelines and waterways.

So, it wasn’t a big leap for Gunn – a certified sailing instructor and the coach of Ursuline Academy’s sailing team – to launch a STEM-based effort at Ursuline to help alleviate the problem: Why not challenge students to engineer a more eco-friendly boat sail than the plastic-coated ones typically used in recreational boating – and then give this reimagined sail to a subsistence fisherman in Haiti.

“This (project) had been in my head for years,” said Gunn, who taught Ursuline’s “STEM for Others” elective to seven Ursuline juniors during the 2022-23 school year. The course, set to enter its second year this fall, immerses students in science, technology, engineering and math as they collaborate on a practical, hands-on service project.

Why Haiti?

Gunn said the decision to make Haiti the recipient of his students’ STEM efforts was inspired by his sailing team’s volunteer work with Sails for Sustenance, a New Orleans-based non-profit that collects used sails in the United States and ships them to Haiti for distribution to subsistence fishermen. As Gunn and his Ursuline sailors were sorting used sails destined for the impoverished island-nation, they noticed that most of them “were at the end of their life.”

“We’re kind of shipping our trash to them, and they’re reusing it – which they’re very ingenious at doing – but I thought there had to be a better solution than shipping them our trash,” Gunn said.

To prepare for the hands-on portion of their sail-making endeavor, class members learned about the lives of subsistence fishermen in Haiti – and their reliance on very rustic, wind-powered boats – during a classroom visit from Enel Cleopatra, a Haitian immigrant now living in New Orleans.

“Subsistence fishermen are only catching enough fish to feed their family and possibly selling a few,” Gunn explained.

The STEM for Others students also studied a sail’s “anatomy,” discovering that the vast majority of today’s sails are fabricated out of dacron polyester coated in plastic. As sails degrade over time, this plastic – a petro-chemical by product – is microscopically released into waterways.

“You can always tell the difference between an old sail and a new sail,” Gunn said. “A new sail is very crispy,  because it still has all that  plastic on it. An old sail feels like a bed sheet, because all the plastic has fallen off. Where is all that (microscopic) plastic going? It doesn’t just ‘go away.’ The plastic that was on the sail is now in the environment.”

Trial and error

The teenage engineers discovered that making a more sustainable sail would involve more than simply cutting out a triangular piece of cloth.

“A sail is actually three-dimensional – if you lay a sail on the floor, it’s not going to lie flat; there’ll be a bubble in it,” Gunn said. “The panels that we sew together are curved. This is what puts shape into the sail.”

The students started out  by piecing together small “practice sails” out of nylon tablecloth material, attaching them to wheeled, cardboard “sail cars” and racing different sail designs in simulated wind conditions. They progressed to building larger practice sails out of heavyweight plastic garbage bags, later testing them out on real boats on Lake Pontchartrain. These test-runs revealed the sails’ tearing points and helped students make the necessary reinforcements.

“The  most load on the sails is going to be in the corners, because that’s where the sails are being pulled from,” Gunn explained.

Prototype phase

The STEM for Others crew ultimately decided to make two full-size prototypes using fabrics rarely used in sail construction: one made of biodegradable cotton-duck canvas; the other, made of “Top Gun” – a waterproof fabric commonly used to make boat covers. Although not biodegradable, Top Gun lasts twice as  long as a traditional dacron sail, Gunn said.

Assembling the sails presented yet another learning curve to the students. After measuring and cutting out their sails’ fabric components with upholstery shears, they used a thick, UV-stable thread to stitch the pieces together on a heavy duty machine previously used for sewing jeans. They also installed a series of stainless steel-grommets on the sails  – reinforced openings that enable sails to be roped to the boat’s rigging.

And the winner is...

Although both prototypes performed very well on Lake Pontchartrain, a snag awaited the team of STEM students. In February, while presenting the two prototypes to a group of Haitian fishermen via Skype, the young engineers learned that neither the cotton duck nor the Top Gun sail was a viable option due to their weight.

 “What we learned in that Skype call was that (many Haitian fishermen) manually carry their sails from home to their boat every time they use them,” Gunn said. “They never leave the sail (unattended) on the boat because it would get stolen. We didn’t gather this information from our first conversation because the weight wasn’t really on our minds; it wasn’t something we thought to ask.”

In the end, the students made their final set of sails out of lightweight dacron – a main sail measuring in at 17 feet tall and 19 feet wide; and a smaller companion sail called a jib.

“It’s still a net win for everybody because we’re giving them a new product that will last much longer (than a used sail),” said Gunn, noting that the gift was hand-delivered to Haiti by members of the Haiti Sailing Cup, which holds a regatta for local fishermen. After the race, the Ursuline sails were given to a fisherman in need.

Faith in action

Madelyn Oster, a rising Ursuline senior, said her favorite part of the STEM course was the opportunity to do “hands-on collaborative work” with her friends. She said her new skill set includes learning how to measure out the parts of a sail and sew them together in a way that enables the sail to “catch the wind” correctly.

“I look at sails a little differently now,” said Madelyn of her year-long foray into nautical engineering. “I now look at the sail and see just how much work was put into it.”

Madelyn also credits the course for fostering her “love for being able to help people.”

“I will remember this class forever because I was able to get out of the traditional classroom and work with my hands to help people who are less fortunate than us,” she said. “We are called in the Catholic Church to serve others, and that is exactly what this class was doing. It made me feel like I was doing real work to help change someone’s life for the better.”

Gunn, who also teaches eighth-grade and sophomore religion at Ursuline, said his students will continue to refine their sail in the upcoming school year, as a new crop of students enroll in the course.

“The ultimate goal is for them to find a more suitable fabric that would also be able to be made in Haiti,” Gunn said. “There is certainly the talent in Haiti to make sails – there’s already a textile industry there. So, we want to have Haitians make their own sails in Haiti to support their own economy. If we can ever achieve that, then we’ll move on to another project, whatever that might be!”

Ursuline’s sailing team and STEM for Others course also partner with Community Sailing New Orleans, a 501-c3 whose mission is to make sailing accessible to all. 

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