The Wahine Project brings kids to the ocean to learn lessons in mindfulness and environmental stewardship.

It’s a misty, gray morning in late July – the kind where the ocean blends into the sky at the horizon, with hardly any features to distinguish the two. It’s Monday, the first day of the last of nine weeks of surf camp at the Wahine Project. The campers show up at Del Monte Beach in Monterey in ones and twos, dropped off by parents, often a little shy at first. They’re sorted into groups according to age and gender – each group with its own plot of sand, instructors and dry-erase board advertising this as “Mindful Monday.” (Each day of the week has a theme at camp: There’s also Trash Tuesday, Waterwoman Wednesday, Thankful Thursday and Aloha Friday.)

In the 7- to 10-year-old girls group, it’s not long before everyone is playing. The game involves using boogie boards to slide down a small sand bank. Some do this on their bellies while others, braver, run and jump onto a perfectly positioned board, riding it down the incline like a skateboard. Over at the older girls camp, meanwhile, there’s a volleyball circle happening.

Eventually, the instructors gather up the excited, wiggling campers to begin the week. Instructor Sean Crowe in the 7 – to 10-year-old girls group begins by asking who’s new and who has been to camp before. Most of the group of about 20 girls are seasoned surfers, it turns out. But about five raise their hands to signal this is their first time. (A couple of girls raise their hands for both options.)

“Who is a little nervous?” Crowe asks. Two forthright youngsters raise their hands. This leads the group into a collaborative conversation about what one might possibly be nervous about in the ocean, if one was perhaps nervous, hand raised or not: sharks, jellyfish, waves, falling, rip currents – all eminently logical things to be afraid of.

Crowe addresses these dangers one by one in a calm manner: The only jellyfish here are moon jellies and they’re safe, he says, but this might not be true at another beach. Rip currents, though not particularly strong on this Mindful Monday, are everywhere and definitely a thing to watch out for – a seasoned water person knows not to fight the current but swim parallel to the shore to escape its grip.

“The ocean can be scary sometimes. But once you get familiar with it, it becomes less scary,” Crowe tells the gathered small surfers.

This is essentially the mission statement of the Wahine Project (Hawaiian for woman or girl), founded in 2010 by Dionne Ybarra.

“I was raised to really fear the water,” says Ybarra, who grew up in East Alisal. But she found a way to get past that fear, and it changed her life. “When I finally [surfed] it was the most incredible experience.”

Wahine focuses on bringing diverse kids from all across Monterey County, some who have never been in the ocean before, to the Pacific to break down barriers to ocean sports. Another goal is to foster better environmental stewardship through an appreciation for the ocean.

These days, what started as a summer camp for girls has grown into a community nonprofit offering camps for all (starting as young as age 4), school year programs, women’s surf trips and more. In a given year, about 2,000 kids pass through Wahine programs. The organization offers scholarships for families who need them.

Alice Aguillon began as a camp mom when her son joined Wahine. The Castroville native didn’t necessarily feel like surfing was for her – “Surfing is a man’s sport, and it’s dominated by white people,” she observes. But then she met Ybarra. “Oh my god, she’s a woman and she’s Latina – I gotta do this,” Aguillon remembers thinking.

Now an instructor and Wahine’s operations manager, Aguillon enjoys shepherding others, especially teens, through this same process of discovery.

“This is a public place, anyone can come out here and have fun,” Aguillon says of the beach. “The feeling once you catch your first wave is amazing. Surfing forces you to live in the moment… there’s a lot going on in the ocean and you have to be aware.”

Learn more about THE WAHINE PROJECT at thewahineproject.org.