Last Friday brought a close to our second full week of classes at the Woods Hole Campus. The theme for last week—marine populations—led us to a wide range of topics and discussions. Whether it was leafing through the pages of whaling logbooks filled with intricate illustrations of whales, flying fish, and porpoises at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, or discussing the complexities of the policy that regulates fishery management, our studies gave us a deeper understanding of the integral role marine populations play in our lives.

Time certainly does fly when you’re having fun, and SEA Semester’s on-shore component has proven this to me and my fellow class and shipmates. With a mere 17 days left in Woods Hole, Class S-290 has begun to curate plans for our trip around New Zealand. During our pizza lunch with the President of SEA, Peg Brandon, we discussed our hopes for the upcoming voyage. I’ve compiled a list of things each member of our class wants to accomplish, witness, or avoid. You could call this Class S-290’s bucket list.

We are now beginning our third week of our land portion at SEA Semester in Woods Hole. Our days are packed with classes, guest speakers, research, and cooking for 8 others. We have begun to find the rhythm of what it means to be a student at SEA and that means diving into our studies. Last week our classes’ main focus was Marine Populations.

One of the first things I learned in acting school was the concept of a liminal space, or a place of being in-between.  As an actor, my entire job consists of navigating various liminal spaces. See, that’s all a play really is. It’s a state of being in-between.  What we are “in-between” is a set of two different stasis—periods of equilibrium.

Today concludes our first full week of classes onshore. Many of us feel that we have simultaneously been here forever yet feel like we got here just yesterday. This is probably due to the mass amount of information we have already learned and the still-new connections we are making with our future shipmates.

People often say that food is something that brings people together, and so far, it’s definitely been something that has brought our house together rather quickly! During the shore component with SEA, our class is split between three houses, and the members of each house are responsible for figuring out food.

Hello Readers!
Reporting to you from Woods Hole where my shipmates and I are settling in nicely to our small cottage homes.

Here, at the Woods Hole campus, SEA Semester students are split between two chosen programs: Caribbean Colonization to Conservation and Global Ocean: New Zealand. As part of the latter group, we were further divided into three houses: A, B, and C. I live in A-house with seven other people, which more closely resembles a blue cottage with four bedrooms and two bathrooms.

Today we left Great Barrier Island and sailed back to anchorage just outside of Auckland, marking the end of our trip. For our blog today we have decided to share 31 things (for the 31 people on board) that we and our shipmates have learned about life aboard the SSV Bobby C. along the way:

Hello land people, it’s Mathilde! This morning we anchored the boat in another bay at Great Barrier Island with more civilization. Lots of people went ashore for hiking and French fries though I stayed behind to savor the boat in our final days on board the Robert C. Seamans.