With our second full day at SEASCape, we are finally getting into the swing of things here. After a breakfast of potato hash and fried eggs, we had our first class of the day, Oceans and Society with Liz Fisher Sullivan.

As I walk up onto the quarter deck of the ship, the first thing I notice is the raucous clamoring of seabirds. I step into bright sunlight and see Orona off the starboard bow. The azure water crashes in foaming waves over the outer reef a short 50 meters from our anchorage.

SEA Expedition II, the second of two high school summer sessions aboard the SSV Corwith Cramer, sails from Boston on July 29 and arrives on Aug. 10 in Portland, Maine. SEA Expedition is a field-based program in which students participate in every aspect of an offshore sailing and oceanographic voyage.

The SEAScape crew was very excited yesterday as they arrived one by one to their new home for the next three weeks! After a variety of ice breakers led by enthusiastic RA’s were done, the group started to get to know each other and went to play volleyball and badminton on the grass.

We left Kanton yesterday, an absolutely amazing place I’ll never forget. A watch (my watch) was then completely wrecked with dawn watch (0100-0700). Fully exhausted from adventures in Kanton and working to get underway again; it was rough.

After a week at sea with no land in sight, the presence of the Boston cityscape on the horizon and the crisscross of scurrying boat traffic has been nothing less than dramatic.  However, our intrepid sailor/scientists remained focused on their duties and brought us safely to anchor near Georges Island, part of Boston Harbor proper.

Hi Mom! Today is the day we set sail for Orona. My early morning was spent recovering from a long night of performances, dancing, storytelling and a feast I won’t soon forget.  After few hours standing watch my fellow watch mates and I hopped into our Defender (small boat) and headed to a new coral sight recently named “coral plains”, and for good reason.

Welcome to the SEASCape Session 2 Blog! This will be updated daily by the students in pairs. For today, the students are just settling into SEA campus, so we (the student coordinators) have written the first blog post.

Bonjour (as the sailors say),

It has been a fun time here on Mama Cramer (Where’s Daddy Cramer?). We are in Stellwagen Bank if you hadn’t noticed yet, but we can see large ‘fish’ called whales or in sailor lingo wh’ls.

Kanton was the paradise you always read about as a kid, and leaving this beautiful atoll is like a snap back into reality, one that is going to be relatively hard to make. The plethora of wildlife alone was absolutely breathtaking.