Today is the last day of SEASCape. there were mixed emotions of thankfulness to go home, and sadness for leaving a bunch of new and incredible friends.

Hello outside world, it’s Kerry here. So many of my shipmates have already touched on the wondrous place that is PIPA with its stunning culture, biodiversity-not to mention the sweet snorkel spots. I believe I speak for everyone when I say PIPA will be dearly missed and when we return to our respective homes, we will recount our experiences here such frequency that you polliwogs may become tired of hearing how we swam with baby sharks or saw an awesome blue dragon slug.

Today we had a guest speaker, Amy Kukulya, a leading engineer behind shark cam at WHOI. She talked to us about her career pathways and aspirations in engineering and other fields such as environmental policy. She described many difficulties she has had to face in the field, like being the only female in a white male environment. Her talk was very inspirational and eye-opening for all of us.

The day started with the normal morning routine. Once everyone had gotten out of bed, we learned our final knot for the program: the sheet bend. None of us could tell this knot apart from the bowline, but we believes the RAs that it was different. Our first event of the mornings was Oceans and Society, in which we learned about the history and culture of the Caribbean, namely Jamaica. We read the authors Mary Prince, and Jamaica Kincaid.

Today was a bittersweet day for all of us. Around 1245 we crossed the PIPA boundary and sailed into a new EEZ. Although most of us are excited to get home soon, as well as to be done with all of our assignments in the next few days, PIPA has treated us extraordinarily well over the past 3.5 weeks.

Here we are, on the last leg of our long journey through PIPA! Woot! We’re almost there. Destination: American Samoa. We’ve conducted SO much research and data sampling to add to a fantastic data set in these remote parts of the world. Pretty sweet as.

Our students have learned the ship and are beginning to take on the responsibilities as junior watch leaders.

Ahoy landlubbers!!

We are slowly approaching the end of our voyage LL. As of now, we plan on anchoring tonight, ending our continuous voyage sailing at sea.

Today we went on the Plymouth Whale Watch. While boating out to the shelf, where whales usually to go get food, we saw a calf and her mother. The mom’s name was Venom and was nursing the baby whale, Diad.

Hello Everyone,

It is I, Cody Hoff, here to bring you another blog post from this incredible journey that we have all been on. It is incredible how the time has gone by as of lately. We had an action packed few days at the island of Nikumaroro and it was everything that I imagined it would be and then some. I was excited to swim with the black-tip reef sharks but I was amazed at how close they would get to us.

We’ve reached the second Sunday of our voyage on C279, but have a few more sailing days to go until reaching our final destination in Woods Hole. The weather last night was squally and the students had the chance to see one of our least-set sails, the storm trysail, in action. Thankfully, the squalls abated by morning into a beautiful, sunny day.