Newport Sea Scout skipper’s 56 years of volunteering earn Leadership Award
When the Sea Scouts founded their Newport Beach unit in 1962, Mike “Skip” Stewart was there.
By now he’s received most of the awards an adult can get from the organization, the maritime branch of the Boy Scouts, so when one of his colleagues saw an opportunity to honor Stewart’s 56 years of continuous volunteer service, he strongly encouraged the 80-year-old former sailor to join him Wednesday at the annual awards dinner for Orange County’s Venturing programs.
Stewart had a hunch he would get an award and he joked that he was being kidnapped. But he went along. What he wasn’t expecting was the group of boys — squared away in their dress whites — who filed into the back of the room just before he picked up his Sea Scout Leadership Award.
Almost all 22 of the unit’s currently registered Scouts were there, not because they were being honored but because Stewart was.
“It’s not often we can surprise Skip,” said Dale Stoica, the unit committee chairman. “And having them all show up, that means they care.”
Stewart has been the volunteer skipper for Sea Scout Ship (or troop) 711 since 1963. Before that, he was a mate, akin to an assistant Scoutmaster, and not much older than the Scouts he guided. The Sea Scouts are for youths ages 14 to 20, in the vein of the high-adventure Venturing program.
Stewart said most of his Scouts are good kids who are trying to be even better, even though today’s teens have more demands on their time than they did in the 1960s through ’80s. He said he tries “to keep them on the straight and narrow.”
The troop meets almost every Wednesday — that’s about 3,000 Wednesdays for Stewart — and on most weekends.
Stewart left one of his mates, Darryl Mack, in charge of Wednesday’s regular meeting to supervise the boys as they practiced knots and compass reading in advance of a competition this month at the California State University Maritime Academy in Vallejo. The unit usually does well in competitions. In 2006 it was named the top Sea Scout ship in the country and made the top 10 last year.
After Stoica told Mack that Stewart was up for an award, Mack quietly mobilized the rest of the unit to go to the dinner.
Stewart was born in Riverside and joined a Sea Scout unit in the area as a teenager before serving two years of active duty in the Navy. After that, he returned to the Orange County area he knew well — his family had a summer home in Newport Beach — and earned a certificate in data processing at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, operating computers that stored data on punched tape.
Stoica, 29, was one of the roughly 650 Scouts whom Stewart has mentored in the past half-century. He said Stewart lets the boys lead the way as they explore maritime and life skills aboard a Columbia 43 sloop named Del Mar.
Mack’s son Evan, who has administrative duties for the unit as its yeoman and purser, is looking at joining the Coast Guard after he graduates next year from University High School in Irvine.
“You have a chance to actually go out and try stuff and learn about the boat,” he said.
Stoica told the awards dinner crowd that “anyone involved in Sea Scouting or anything remotely boat-related in Newport Harbor knows Mike Stewart.”
“If I am half as active as he is at half his age, I will consider myself in great shape,” Stoica said. “Skip, get up here.”
Stewart rose, as did the rest of the room.
“All right,” he said, a slight chuckle escaping as he accepted his award. “Wow. Thank you all.”
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