When you first meet him, it's easy to envision Captain Rick Lefevre as a crusty, old-school skipper who has spent a lifetime at sea, but the fact is he didn't come to found City Sail by way of crewing yachts or captaining tugs. He actually spent 25 years in the corporate world as an engineer before his career as a teacher/captain began. In 1990, as the lone survivor of a family that had been devastated by alcoholism, Lefevre decided it was time to turn the negative experiences of a lousy upbringing into a positive force to help area kids.

"I had a pretty unhappy childhood and went through a lot of difficult times when I was young," says Lefevre. "I dropped out of high school at 15 because I had nowhere to live." His father was a chronic drinker who died from alcohol-related disease. His mother took her own life. And his sister was killed in a car accident. Alcohol was involved.

Lefevre joined the army as soon as he was of legal age, completed high school while enlisted, and spent eight and a half years in night school at Temple studying for his engineering degree. He says he never had addiction problems of his own, but as he matured, he acknowledged that he had all kinds of issues and poor interpersonal skills. He enrolled in a twelve-step program for adult survivors of alcoholics and learned a great deal about himself. He did volunteer work with children and soon realized that his troubled youth gave him a real empathy for the problems city kids faced.

Lefevre had started sailing for recreation in the 80s, and in 1990, he quit his job to combine his sailing skills and connection with kids in pursuit of a dream. "City Sail started based on the idea that if you could turn kids on to education, the rest of their problems would take care of themselves. I believe in helping kids see the real potential in life."

The teamwork begins as soon as we venture aboard. The kids have introduced themselves to one another, been familiarized with the North Wind's layout, and split into two equal sized groups. The first goes to the stern (which we all now know is the rear of the boat) with Captain Rick; the second joins Mark and his assistant Peter amidships. We motor away from the dock and into the river while Captain Rick gives a run down of the tools to be found at the helm.

The steering wheel controls the rudder--and therefore our direction-while the compass gives us our bearing as we head across the channel and head upstream with the tide. The depth sounder provides a profile of the bottom; the geographic positioning system (GPS) pinpoints our position by taking signals from satellites orbiting miles overhead.