Sailing through setbacks, Pirates & Mermaids breakfast returns to Greenport

After several years of disappointing cancellations due to everything from bad weather to Covid shutdowns, the annual Paul Drum Pirates & Mermaids fundraiser breakfast was back on track last week at Front St. Station in Greenport.  

“It was a great event,” said Sharon Sailor, who hosts the fundraiser at the family’s restaurant. “It just brought people together, brought community together, and it gave us a chance to obviously raise funds, but also to let people know about our project and our program — and the response was fantastic.”

Normally, the popular event is held each year during the East End Seaport Museum & Marine Foundation’s Maritime Festival in Greenport to raise money for the Paul Drum Life Experience Project summer programs for local children aged 7 to 12.

The $5,000 goal for this year was not reached on Sunday, Ms. Sailor said, but she and co-founder Arlene Klein and a few other local women will continue fundraising efforts into the fall and winter.

The Project doesn’t charge the roughly 200 kids who attend the summer sessions each year, and the organizers don’t take salaries. In the past, they’ve managed to rely to some extent on the generosity of volunteer instructors donating their time, but the costs are increasing and, as in the past, the most recent event was the group’s biggest fundraiser of the year. 

“When we first started, the classes were a couple hundred dollars apiece, but [costs] are increasing,” said Ms. Sailor, the mother of Mr. Drum, a Greenport native with Down Syndrome. “Now, the storytelling through face painting class is $550.”

For eight weeks each summer, the educational PDLEP introduces wide-eyed children to a spectrum of different kid-friendly activities in Greenport.  

“We don’t want it to be school-oriented,” Ms. Sailor said this week. “We want to do things that pique kids’ interest.”

The wide-ranging summer classes have included Japanese fish printing, a traditional art form in which one side of a fish is dipped in sumi ink and pressed against rice paper to make an impression. Culinary arts students from the Cornell Cooperative Extension have also been brought in to teach the tots ice-cream making.

The program works with the Quogue Wildlife Refuge each summer to bring live animals including owls, tortoises and snakes to class. The kids have also explored beekeeping, honey-spinning, candle making and magic. There have also been classes in puppet-making, storytelling through face painting even baby goat yoga sessions at Catapano Dairy Farm in Peconic.

In August, the project partnered with the Southold Police Dept. to introduce youngsters to the equipment police use to do their jobs, including the department’s ATVs, patrol cars, motorcycles, mountain bikes, police boats, drones, the mobile command center and a kid-sized fingerprinting station.

“With little kids, it’s always ‘don’t touch, don’t touch,” Ms. Sailor said at the time. “This is totally the opposite: this is hands on. They go through the mobile command center, into the [patrol] cars. They touch everything, and they sit on everything, and they get a feel for policing.”