Are you catching up on reading during this period of social distancing? We asked our faculty to recommend books - both new and classics - that they’ve found entertaining, informative, or inspiring. Here’s what they came up with.

Once on the boat, the concept of time seems to slip away from all of us. Days don’t make sense. Recalling events and approximating how long ago they happened takes effort. This trip, we decided to take advantage of that. As previously written by the lovely Sonia, we experienced an Easter-ween celebration taking part in both Easter and Halloween festivities.

Welcome home to the SSV Corwith Cramer! It was a long, cold trip north from sunny St. Croix, and the professional crew worked hard to complete the delivery, arriving in Woods Hole on Saturday, April 18th.

In addition to coordinating SEA’s assistant scientist team, SEA’s Science Program Coordinator Kimberly Reed Nutt oversees SEA’s oceanographic database and processes requests for use of data collected during SEA programs from interested students and collaborating research scientists.  Over the past 50 years, SEA has sailed extensively in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and collected data on annually recurring cruise tracks, allowing us to investigate ocean questions over time.

SEA Semester in the NEWS
“UNCW’s Julian Murray-Brown ‘21 Spends a Semester at Sea”
By Alex Churchill
Univeristy of North Carolina Wilmington News

Julian Murray-Brown ’21 is one of 25 undergraduate students from universities across the United States who boarded the SSV Robert C. Seamans 134-foot brigantine in early February. The six-week study abroad program offered by the Sea Education Association allowed the students to study how humans have influenced New Zealand’s marine environment.

After sailing onboard the Seamans, you begin to collect information. For example the sails begin to take on a life with their history and repairs.

Hello friends and family! It has been 15 days without a speck of land in sight! While the ocean constantly changes shades and temperaments it is hard to tell one patch of ocean from the next. I could almost convince myself that we have stayed in the same place if I never glanced at the chart with our cruise track that is rapidly streaking northeast across the South Pacific.

****Note:  to happily poke fun at the absurd nature of nautical language, and also to give readers at home a fun activity, this blog post is in “Mad Libs” form. Please fill in the numbered blanks with the parts of speech included in the blanks.

Hello Robert C. Seamans fans, friends, and family! We’ve had a pretty dreamy start to our voyage, with strong favorable winds allowing us to sail fast and put more than 1,000 nautical miles behind us. The weather has been getting warmer each day and now in the afternoon, off-watch crewmembers can often be found whittling, reading, and playing music on deck in the sunshine.

Time flies when you’re sailing along at 8 knots! We were finally able to turn off the engine after nearly 24 hours underway, it feels so much better to just be harnessing the power of the wind. This is the first time I’ve stood watch in over three years and I am having an absolute blast.