Gregor Rinaldi attended Camp Seagull as a pre-teen and remembered it with great fondness, we were happy to award him the Bradfield Society Travel Award to support his return to Camp Seagull to help build wonderful memories for future generations of Camp Seagull attendees, here is Gregor’s story;

YMCA Camp seagull is a seafaring summer camp for boys between the ages of 6-16 in Arapahoe, North Carolina. Unlike typical summer camps, campers here are free to come and go from activities as they please, and require no prior sign up to do so. The focus of the camp is on ranks, which can be obtained in over 14 disciplines split between the land and the sea. Despite the heavy focus on ranks and skills, the camp ensures all campers understand and practise its focus on moral objectives. Here, campers are pushed to be and do better, treat others with respect, and help each other out.

I was a camper for four years between the ages of 7 and 11, along with my sister, who attended Seagull’s sister camp, Camp Seafarer. We took after my mum and uncle, who also both went in the 1980s, when camp looked very different, but somehow also the same.

Campers stay in cabins with around 10 other boys or girls their age, along with two or three counsellors who live in the cabin with them. There is an option to do either a two-week session or a four-week session, and the summer is made up of two four-week sessions (or four two-week ones).

Campers wake up at 7:30 to the sound of reveille being played across the camp on loudspeakers. Camp uses loudspeakers as clocks, as electronic devices are strictly banned here. Reveille is for wake-up, soupée for mealtimes, tattoo for call to quarters and taps for sleep, among others. After a family-style breakfast, the campers go back to their cabins to get ready for the day ahead.

The day is split into two activity periods and, depending on your age, you would either spend the first on the land or the sea.

Both years I worked, I worked as a powerboating instructor. After the kids left for activities in the morning, I would go to the pier. My duties included taking the fleet of 10 centre-console boats around the pier for mooring, ready to be used by upper ranks and ski, as well as setting up the 20 Scouts.

Scouts are small boats, big enough for five campers, with a small 25-horsepower engine. Campers can check these boats out if they have their US powerboating licence, which can be obtained by achieving the third rank in powerboating.

After this, I normally taught classes for the morning. You wait at the top of the pier holding a sign for whatever rank you are teaching, and the campers who need it will come up to you to sign up. First, we do a theory lesson in the classroom. Then, the campers get on the Scouts and follow me out into the open water, where they can practise the manoeuvres, they have just learnt in the classroom.

The on-the-water portion of the ranks is the hardest part of the job, as it can mean that I am trying to teach five boats, each driven by eight-year-olds, how to perform technical manoeuvres.

If we are not in activity periods, I’m spending all my time with the kids. If I’m on site, I am always working, no matter the time. Spending four weeks with a group of young men means that you get to know them all quite well.

That’s not to say that it isn’t hard. I was extremely challenged last year in my cabin. But the overall focus is that we have no idea what these kids have going on at home. We try to create a safe and happy place at camp for all these campers.

Although it is not exclusively a Christian camp, Seagull does maintain its religious undertones. Every night, after the taps bugle plays, we sit the kids down for a devotion. Devotion, or “devo”, gives the campers an opportunity to wind down after the busy day, reflect on their experiences and learn new things.

Whilst most devos are not centred around Christianity, the moral undertones stay the same. Although we often try to talk to the kids at the beginning, it is essential that we involve them in the devotions so that we can learn as much about them as we can, and so that they can learn about their cabin-mates.

Camp Seagull is a really special place for me, and for the thousands of young men who pass through each summer. This year, two counsellors from Spain and Australia came to visit me in London, and I asked them what they thought about camp. They said that it was unlike anything they had ever experienced, and that the “Seagull bubble” really does exist, where kids and counsellors alike spend a summer disconnected from everything else going on around them before they go back to school.

It’s the reason I chose to come back and work seven years after I last attended as a camper, and it’s why so many others do the same.

Gregor Rinaldi (C 20-25)

Gregor is now taking Business Studies at Newcastle University and we wish him all the best in his studies

This coming summer we will once again be opening applications for our Travel Awards, with categories of Adventure Travel, Eco Travel and Charity Project. The application deadline will be Friday 7 May 2027. More details to follow…