7 minute read
Now & Later
Olivia Vincent ’24 and Kathleen McNally Saville ’74
Lincoln students and alumnae with a shared purpose or passion
Sailor Olivia Vincent and rower Kathleen Saville feel alive on boats in the ocean, working the wind and waves. Vincent was a member of the Lincoln team that completed the Newport Bermuda race this year – the race’s first all-female youth team. Saville is a Guinness World Record holder; the first woman to row two oceans. Both love the technical, intellectual, and emotional challenges of ocean boating and its singular payoffs, from bioluminescence to big blue horizons.
Olivia Vincent ’24 started sailing when she was 7 years old, learning in dinghies at the Saunderstown Yacht Club. She later moved to the Edgewood Yacht Club for lessons. Her parents sailed and wanted her to experience the sport. She didn’t love it right away. Then something clicked. She started to enjoy being alone in a boat. There was a feeling of calm command. Sailing requires intense focus – to be present to read the wind and water and to swiftly and smartly respond to both.
“It’s the best thing to clear your head,” she says. “Whether you’re out there for an hour, or four days, there is no phone. No homework. You’re just there on the water. Sailing is a mental game. It’s so much about intelligence – assessing a situation and reacting. It’s also about being intuitive, of paying attention to the water, to the waves, to other boats.”
Teamwork is a joy of the sport. Vincent is a member of Lincoln’s sailing team and trained for the race with six classmates. From March to June, they piled into a car on weekends and drove to Long Island to train on a Farr 40 named Blue, provided by Oakcliff Sailing Center. Team Bitter End would spend the weekends cold and hustling, but the rides were warm and easy, singing to someone’s playlist and eating Chipotle.
The camaraderie paid off. On June 17, the start day of the Newport Bermuda race, a storm kicked up thunder, lightning, and rain that meant the team had to don full foulie sets. Many racers dropped out. Team Bitter End pressed on, sailing 635 miles over four days. Each girl sailed for four hours, spent the next two hours on deck, then slept for two hours – then did it all over again. They ate candy from the “morale bag” and replaced a broken pin connecting the boom sail to the mast – a MacGuyver-style fix that kept them in the race. They finished 27th out of 200 teams. Little girls greeted them on the docks, cheering.
“I feel like a different person,” Vincent says. “I feel I have potential. I can aim high if I want to. I can achieve big things.”
Kathleen McNally Saville ’74 spent three years at Lincoln, graduating in 1974. She was different than other girls in her grade – shy, watchful, middle class. But attending an all-girls school with small classes had impact. All around her, Saville saw examples that you could be yourself, think for yourself, share your opinions. Lincoln helped her become the woman she is.
That woman broke records – five Guinness World Records, all for ocean rowing.
Saville and her husband, the late Curt Saville, built a 25-foot custom row boat in a ramshackle barn in Touisett Point and rowed that boat, the Excaliber, 83 days across the Atlantic in 1981, from Morocco to Antigua, then 392 days across the Pacific, from Peru to Australia in 1984 and 1985. These crossings were dotted with shooting stars, roiling storms, circling sharks, menacing reefs, ham radio chatter, exotic ports stays, daydreaming, exhaustion, seasickness and schools of yellowfin tuna shining in the moonlight. The Savilles were nearly run over by a ferry in the Atlantic and capsized in the Pacific, losing the sextant they used for navigation. For more than two months, they navigated with the stars and by sunrises and sunsets. At the end of the Pacific crossing, Saville was five months pregnant with her son, Christopher.
“Rowing long distance requires mental endurance as well as physical endurance,” she says. “It requires teamwork. I learned a lot about working together, dealing with isolation, and taking responsibility for your decisions.”
Saville jokes that she majored in rowing at the University of Rhode Island, and, after graduation, decided not buy a house and raise a family – the typical American life of security and success. Instead, she has traveled from Tunisia to Thailand, and lived the last 25 years in Egypt, where she leads the Department of Rhetoric and Composition at the American University of Cairo. In 2019, Saville taught in the Semester at Sea program, visiting 13 cities in 12 countries. When Saville retires in a couple of years, she will live in Vermont, near Christopher, and sail her 26-foot boat in North Carolina.
“I plan to do what makes me happy,” says the author of Rowing for My Life. “I will make books and hang out on the boat.”
HANDS On
with Noelle Walters
A look at Lincoln’s signature approach to active learning
In Noelle Walter’s Grade 6 Science, Technology, Engineering, Art/Architecture, Math (STEAM) class, girls are taking apart everyday objects – a fishing reel, a soda stream machine, a printer, an electric drill, a one-cup coffee maker, a computer keyboard. Then they catalogue the contents and rebuild the gears, wires, motors, and chips into something altogether different. It’s a lesson in demolition, demystification, and imagination, one that demands careful observation, creativity, and problem-solving skills.
The goal is to show students how things work, and, in the process, how to appreciate the minds of inventors, designers, and engineers. As part of the lesson, Walters shows girls patent applications, detailed drawings that explain the novelty of an invention, and shares a variety of books in the vein of David Macaulay – books that show what’s inside and how parts can work together as a system.
Delight is a delicious by-product.
“Surprise is a frequent reaction in class,” Walters said. “The girls see there is more beneath the surface of these objects. They can get inside and see all the parts – how they fit together and work together. It can be stunning – so many pieces, layers of them.”
Of course, deconstruction is a thrill. One girl could not wait to wield a hammer. But even bigger thrills came later, when the class took apart the items and arrayed every piece on a tray in order to photograph the contents and compare them to sketches of their original ideas of what was inside these devices. Girls
then started designing something new from the parts. One group is turning a computer printer into a toy squirrel.
Walters is new to Lincoln this year, serving as the new lower and middle school STEAM teacher. With 16 years of experience teaching at independent schools, Walters is equally drawn to science and art – no surprise from a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University. Creating this Lincoln lesson allowed her to develop students’ STEAM skills, build their confidence in using tools, and share her own fascination with how things work.
“I recently found my grandfather’s watch and had it repaired and restored. It was amazing to see the insides,” Walters said. “The jeweler is in Riverside, and he’s a master watchmaker. He might Zoom into the class.”
After a recent class, student Evalyn Coulombe ’29 stayed behind to clamp together two pieces of her new creation. She is part of the crew turning the printer into a squirrel and was making a desk for the squirrel’s “office.”
“I’m enjoying this,” Evalyn said. “It’s really fun.”
“Yeah, I think it’s fun, too,” Walters said. “Do you also feel like you’re learning something?”
“It’s fun taking things apart, but this is my favorite part – when you get to see inside. It’s cool.” Evalyn said. “It’s like when we were taking apart the printer and we kept getting down to different levels, and it was like a whole other world.”
