THE BLOG: Insights, advice and news from our summer camp experts
Tom Brady nails it here in this interview in People mag.
https://people.com/parents/tom-brady-explains-dropping-son-ben-summer-camp-reminded-love-football/
If I could boil down his points it would be as follows:
Camp lets kids be kids.
Everyone is equal.
No electronics.
I couldn’t agree more! Thanks Tom.
The 2022 season, our 11th summer, was epic. We had so much fun working with our campers in their watersports progression. It was also equally rewarding to see the campers...returning and new...grow as individuals and as a group in the camp setting. Add to that nearly perfect weather and a dream staff and we could not be happier with how things went.
Here are some fun stats!
95.71% full (134 spaces filled out of 140 with 121 unique campers)
Campers stayed an average of 1.11 weeks at camp
Average number of campers each week was 19.14
Campers were 67% boys and 33% girls
Average camper age was 13.68 years old
46% new campers and 54% returners
Campers chose to wakeboard 45%, wakesurf 45%, waterski 10%
Campers came from 12 states (CT, MA, MD, ME, NH, NJ, NY, OH, OR, PA, RI and TX) as well as Canada and Italy
1 new camp game (beach kadima foursquare)
6 coaches, 1 chef and 1 director
Average coach age was 20
3,950 meals served by Chef Cher
75 five-gallon buckets of non-meat scraps fed to local hungry pigs to divert food waste from the landfill
10 day campers joined 3 coaches for a week of fun on Lake Sunapee
17,428 unique visitors to www.watermonkeycamp.com
7,706 photos and videos uploaded and shared with camp families
We clocked 514 hours on 3 boats…Maverick (Marley), Iceman and Bob (thanks Wheelan family for letting us have Bob back for a week while Maverick was in the shop)
Our boats had 18 motor oil changes, 1 transmission oil change, 1 blown water pump and 1 blown engine (yikes)
2,997.878 gallons of premium gas burned producing roughly 27.196 metric tons of CO2 which we offset with contributions to the Society For The Protection of New Hampshire Forests and CoolEffect.org . Our contributions this year will offset about 75 metric tons of CO2 with the extra going towards camper travel to and from camp!
We have now offset around 375 metric tons of CO2 since 2012!
And as a parting gift…here is a great fall recipe from Chef Cher: Apple Cider Muffins
We sincerely hope to see all of our campers back here in 2023 and to welcome many more fresh faces to the camp family.
Always feel free to email, call, write, DM, text or stop by to say hello!
Evan
Things have been crazy here at camp! We have had so many projects come together just as our staff and campers are about to arrive.
First, let’s rewind to fall ‘21 when we lifted, leveled and built new footings for all of our cabins.
It was a major project and we are so lucky that a super experienced carpenter/contractor tackled it. He first calculated what height the cabin should be at and then, with a laser level, figured out how much each part of the cabin needed to be lifted. This had to happen slowly because of the age of the cabins and how long they have had to settle. If he had lifted them too quickly the wood frames could have broken!
With the cabins raised and leveled, he next dug four foot deep holes and poured new concrete footings which he attached to the building with new, craftsman quality wood trusses. That meant not only a lot of digging and pouring new concrete but also removing the old footings which were mostly cinder blocks. All said and done I moved and stacked four pallets of cinder blocks!
I definitely put my truck to work this offseason! I have brought 20 loads of demolition debris to our dump since August of '21! I probably should have rented a big dumpster but that’s what work trucks are for, right?
With the cabins newly level and on solid footing for the first time in decades it was time to tackle the big goal of the offseason, new bathrooms in every cabin. The existing ones were dark, soggy and, truthfully, a bit gross. My goal with the new bathrooms was to create bright, durable and easy to clean spaces for our campers and guests. I was not great at capturing pictures of the whole process but we ripped out all of the old fixtures, cut out and removed all of the walls up to about 34” and then removed the entire floor, subfloor and joists. Our amazing contractor, Trevor, then rebuilt the rooms from the joists up to the ceiling.
The project was super complicated because each bathroom is different so pretty much every floor, piece of trim and plumbing upgrade was custom. They came out so great, though, and we could not be happier to show our campers!
Of course what would a camp project be without some unexpected issues? As we tore apart the bathrooms we found some leaks in the old roof on one of the cabins. With a new roof definitely not in the budget, camp director and master of absolutely no trades, Evan, hopped to action to lay some rolled asphalt roofing over the bad section of roof. A few weeks later we found some leaky areas on another cabin and, in a driving rainstorm, I again climbed up to patch a spot and save the new bathroom!
Interspersed with the other large projects I also wrapped up the renovated dock for our boats. After installing the new floats I also replaced a few broken planks with new trex decking.
And it is awesome to have a dock that is floating again!
As if all of that was not enough, I also rebuilt all of the mulch beds and landscaping around the cabins! It was a long-overdue project and the cabins now look fantastic. I surrounded each cabin with new river stone to help with drainage and also to secure the new lattice from animals looking to make a home. I then dug up all of the old mulch and dirt, uncovered stones to build new rock boundaries and then filled it all in with natural mulch from locally-felled trees.
And seriously, lastly, cabin 5 received all new windows! The old ones were barely functional and the new windows will let in more light while also functioning better (actually opening and closing).
Whew. That was a lot. As we begin our staff training week it is so satisfying to see the camp looking better than ever.
-Evan
One of my two major projects this season was to completely replace all of the floats on camp’s massive dock. Over the past few seasons I have noticed that the dock had a tendency to…sink so it was time to do some work!
Our dock is three pieces that make a roughly 40’ by 30’ ‘T’ shape. One piece gets pulled up on shore for the winter and the other two pieces live up on the hill behind our local marina. Here they were in December:
The first step was sourcing plastic floats that were roughly the same size as the existing ones. With the ongoing supply chain issues in all sectors this proved slightly difficult but I managed to find some great ones from a dock supply company in Florida. I won’t shock you with how much new plastic floats cost!
The next step was to remove the old floats. They were HEAVY, mostly fully of water, and all of the bolts were rusted permanently in place. Ratchets worked on some bolts but some required cutting, prying or just general banging until they broke free. I used a hydraulic jack to lift the dock frame section by section and slide the old floats out to make room for the new ones.
My work pictures end there because it got too involved to measure, drill and bolt in the new floats with stainless steel hardware. At the end I replaced nine floats using 36 sets of bolts, lock nuts and washers. Drilling the aluminum dock ate up three specialty drill bits. I tore open eight of my ten knuckles fighting with rusty bolts. In all it took around 30 man-hours to get it done from start to finish!
Many thanks to my dad, Wayne, a retired physician who also happens to be super helpful with projects like these and is willing to work for free!
Here is the view from the worksite on top of the hill! Our marina stores hundreds of boats on the hill in super organized lines that stretch for miles!
Check back soon as we complete our other major project this spring…all new bathrooms for each cabin!
Our 2021 season is just winding down and it was by far our best...the best staff ever assembled, the best boats and equipment, the best groups of campers we have had the pleasure of working with and the best attitudes from everyone involved dealing with five weeks of rain from June through July! A lot goes into making a summer of camp happen so take a look below at some fun camp stats:
140 campers over 7 weeks (plus 10 campers at our Sunapee Day Camp)
Campers stayed an average of 1.125 weeks at camp
Average number of campers each week was 20
Campers were 27% girls and 73% boys
Average camper age was 13.66
54% new campers and 46% returners
Campers came from 16 states (CA, CO, CT, DC, FL, GA, IL, MA, ME, MT, NH, NJ, NY, OR, PA,RI and TX) as well as Washington, DC, Mexico and the U.S. Virgin Islands (we were closed to most international campers in 2021)
There were 7 coaches, 1 chef and 1 director
Average coach age was 19.7
3 coaches had their birthdays during the summer (Sam, Zoe and Elijah)
3,960 ridiculous meals prepared by Chef Cher who used approximately:
1290 eggs
370 pounds of flour
110 pounds of strawberries
60 pounds of chocolate chips (mostly in 860 homemade choc chip muffins)
250 pounds of chicken
150 gallons of lemonade
65 hours a week of cooking (plus countless hours shopping)
75 five-gallon buckets of non-meat scraps fed to local hungry pigs to divert food waste from the landfill
5 pallets of concrete used to pour new cabin footings
11,309 unique visitors to watermonkeycamp.com in the last 12 months
9,278 photos uploaded and shared with camp families
540 hours on our 2 2021 MasterCraft NXT22's (Bob and Marley)
16 boat oil changes (plus 1 water pump)
3048.935 gallons of gas burned producing roughly 34 metric tons of CO2 which we offset with contributions to the Society For The Protection of New Hampshire Forests and CoolEffect.org Our contributions this year will offset about 75 metric tons of CO2 with the extra going towards camper travel to and from camp!
We have now offset around 300 metric tons of CO2 since 2012!
Those stats do not really do justice to all of the fun we had this summer but hopefully it was a good read! We are hard at work getting ready for 2022 and I sincerely hope to see all of our campers back again for great times on the boats!
-Evan
