Mekhi Spencer is 17, a rising high school junior and, since April, a trainee builder of wooden boats. He’s part of the first cohort at Rocking the Boat’s new workshop in Bayview.
On a recent Wednesday, Spencer was surrounded by an arsenal of tools — a band saw, a table saw, a drill press — and, Spencer said with pride, he knows how to use them all. Sometimes using power tools is scary, but “you just have to do it,” he said.
Among the things he just made: A bevel gauge, used to transfer and replicate angles. This is particularly handy in boatbuilding, when angles are irregular. The tool will serve him well throughout his boatbuilding education, and Spencer is clearly proud to have made it himself.
Rocking the Boat began in 1996, and its first established school started in Hunts Point in the South Bronx, New York, in 1998. The Bayview location opened in October 2024 in the new India Basin Park, as part of a collaboration between the Recreation and Parks Department and the 3rd Street Youth Center & Clinic.
Boat building and sailing are activities these days associated with being white and affluent. Rocking the Boat aims to change that, not because building wooden boats is a particularly lucrative line of work (it isn’t), but with the idea that it’s the kind of pastime that anyone should be able to enjoy.
India Basin Park has an Equitable Development Plan meant to ensure that the recently opened park benefits local kids. One community request: Access to the coastline, and programs that helped them feel comfortable in the water.
Rocking the Boat’s Bronx location cites statistics that participants in the program have high school graduation rates that are nearly twice the local norm: 94 percent for Rocking the Boat trainees versus 57 percent for Hunts Point at large.
It’s unlikely that the program alone accounts for that difference — the teens who volunteered for the program are likely to be highly motivated — but the numbers are impressive.
Rocking the Boat’s Chief Program Officer for the new endeavor in Bayview, Chris Childers, has been living in San Francisco for the past 13 years, and has spent nearly his whole life on the water.
“In high school, I lost my leg,” said Childers. “Getting back out on the water was a very therapeutic and calming thing for me.”
Rocking the Boat’s philosophy is “deep rather than wide” education, said Childers. About 16 students are enrolled each term, with five instructors on hand at any time.
In one year’s time, the students will have built a boat together.
But the boat itself is not the point, said Childers. Instead, he says, the product is everything that building a boat teaches you: Measuring, basic math, collaboration and working through conflict. All are essential to boat building, but these skills will also serve these students well going forward in life.
Three of those instructors understand the benefits of these kinds of programs from personal experience. They recently graduated from the Get Out and Learn program at Downtown High School in San Francisco, which identifies students at risk for not finishing high school and gives them the opportunity to try more experimental, project-based programs.
Among those programs: sailing and boatbuilding. They say that learning to build boats helped them grow into who they are today.
“I was very, very, very shy when I was a freshman,” said Ellen Cohen, a Rocking the Boat assistant and now high school graduate. Cohen’s mom had to force her to join the Get Out and Learn program after pandemic lockdowns left her isolated. Sailing demands a lot, she said.
“It requires just so much communication when you’re sailing … you have to be timely, and you just have to work as a very well-oiled machine for the safety of your team members. I feel like that helped me come out of my shell,” said Cohen.
“Boating in general is so weird that it only attracts weirdos in the best possible way,” added Caspian Gessler, another assistant and Get Out and Learn graduate.
Building a boat also gave Gessler a sense of ownership and pride.
“You finish it and you’re like, ‘I just built the most beautiful boat on the face of this planet.’” he said. “The amount of pride that you get completing it just overrides anything that low-key sucked about it while you were doing it.”
When the new San Francisco Rocking the Boat program began in October last year, it struggled to recruit students. In the spring, only seven of the program’s 16 slots were filled.
“If you build it, they won’t necessarily come,” Childers said. “You have to build trust.” As a new program in the area, he said, it took a while to earn the trust of parents.
Since then, positive word of mouth has boosted enrollment. Fourteen students are enrolled in the summer class. Five of the students now enrolled are from local Bayview-Hunters Point, which has a median income 16.7 percent lower than San Francisco as a whole.
Childers said this is by design. Students apply to the program by explaining why they’re interested in learning boatbuilding, and kids who already live in the area get priority.
Spencer said he’s committed to completing the program, which sees students through the end of high school. He likes the tools. He likes taking the boats out on the water. “I’ll definitely stay,” he said.
Childers hopes students “remember the experience,” he said, “I hope they had a good time. Made friends. Learned how to ask for help.”
Rocking the Boat is accepting applications from ninth and 10th graders and offers free boat rides for the public on select weekends this summer and fall. Learn more here.