PORT HADLOCK — There’s no better way to spend the summer than messing around in a boat — unless it’s building one of your own.
That’s members of Community United Methodist Church believe.
A few weeks ago, church members decided to start a community outreach ministry for local youth by helping fund a scholarship at the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding.
The scholarship will enable four local youths to build a 12-foot rowboat at a workshop in July.
“It’s a good community project,” Hank Hazen, a sailor and church member said. “You can’t go too far wrong just messing about in boats.”
The ministry is a response to a proposal presented by Jim Maupin at a meeting of the East Jefferson Rotary Club in June.
Maupin, vice-commodore of the Port Hadlock Yacht Club, had befriended a 13-year -old boy who was arrested for trespassing on a boat on the dock at Port Hadlock.
Wanting to give the boy and his friends access to a boat, Maupin proposed a scholarship fund to pay the workshop tuition, and asked the Rotary Club to fund half of it.
Ten days earlier, Hazen and other church members had completed a Bible study that focused on how economic inequalities affect people’s lives, especially children.
Wanting to put their faith into action, they brainstormed ideas. While they did not come up with definite plan, according to lay leader Diane Johnson, they knew they wanted something that would benefit the local community.
Then Johnson, Mike Burkhardt and Pastor Phil Harrington — all Rotary members — heard Maupin’s plea.
“He didn’t expect anything else to come out of it,” Diane Johnson said. “I said, ‘That’s for us.”‘