Passages

Alumni Events Home and Away

Boston, April 26
Mark your calendars for the events coming up this spring and early summer! We are planning for an alumni event again this year in Boston as a response to the great attendance last year. The gathering will be held at Joe’s American Bar & Grill on the Waterfront, Wednesday, April 26th from 5:30 p.m. until 8:30 p.m. with light hors d’ouvres provided by the alumni office and a cash bar.

New York City, June 9
New York City alumni will be happy to know that an event is planned this year while the SSV Corwith Cramer is in the City, docked at the 79th Street Pier. The event is scheduled for Friday night, June 9th from 5:30 p.m. until 8:30 p.m. at the West 79th Street Boat Basin Café. Tours of the refitted Cramer will be available for a limited period during the event.

Woods Hole, June 16/17
SEA will be celebrating its 35th Anniversary in June at the Alumni Reunion scheduled for June 16th and 17th at the SEA campus. To commemorate this milestone, ALL SEA alumni will be invited to attend this year. Reunion classes celebrating 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, and 35 years are eligible to compete for the overnight sail on the Corwith Cramer on Friday evening, June 16th. The reunion class with the highest percentage of classmates giving to the Annual Fund will win the chance to reunite on this overnight sail departing from Dyers Dock.

As always, a great time will be had by all with first-come, first-served day sails on Saturday, followed by dinner and dancing under the tent on Parker Green.

2006 Armin E. Elsaesser Fellowship Announced

Dr. Paul Joyce recently announced the recipient of the 2006 Armin E. Elsaesser Fellowship after unanimous selection by the award committee. The Fellowship goes to Sophia Friedson-Ridenour (C-187) for her project entitled “Investigating a Baltic Homer”. Sophia received her B.A. in political science from Bard College where she is the founder and was co-director of The Ghana Project, a comprehensive program dedicated to humanitarian aid and service work.

This Elsaesser Fellowship project seeks to retrace the Achaean voyage to Troy, as described in Homer’s Iliad, in view of recent scholarly research indicating that the origin of Homeric epics center around the Baltic Sea, not the Mediterranean. In retracing this voyage, Sophia will sail from a colony on the southern tip of Sweden, near Malmo, to the theorized beaches of Troy in southern Finland, near Helsinki. During the trip, a daily journal will be kept in order to compare her own experiences to those of the Achaeans as described by Homer in the Iliad.

In her proposal, Sophia writes, “To retrace the Achaean voyage to Troy in the present day is a rare chance to explore the ways in which past and present landscapes intersect and, in so doing, inform and shape one’s own identity.”

2005 Elsaesser Fellowship Update – WaterWorks River Journey

The WaterWorks River Journey, partially funded by the 2005 Armin Elsaesser Fellowship, concluded on schedule on December 16, 2005 in New Orleans, LA after arriving in the Gulf of Mexico earlier that same day. SEA alumnus and recipient of the 2005 award, Morgan Simmons (C-139A and C-165), departed Lake Chautauqua, NY along with sole crew-member, Aimee Rowe (C-181), early in September of 2005 for the 16-week trip.

The journey, made in an 18-foot bicycle-powered pontoon boat successfully followed the 2,100+-mile journey that a drop of water takes down the Allegheny, Ohio, and Lower Mississippi Rivers all the way to the sea.

During the journey, they spoke to over 2,000 fourth-grade students, in 80 classrooms and from 26 schools, about the watershed concept and human uses of water. Congratulations to Morgan and Aimee on this incredible accomplishment. Morgan will be sailing as an engineer on the Corwith Cramer in June and on the Robert C. Seamans later in the year.

The entire archived collection of the Journey Logbook entries are available online at http://www.riverwaterworks.org/logbook.html.