SEA Semester in the News
Woods Hole Sea Grant Sponsors Two 2020 Knauss Finalists
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Two candidates sponsored by the Woods Hole Sea Grant program are among the finalists for the 2020 class of the of the John A. Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship program. The announcement was made on July 24 by NOAA and the National Sea Grant College Program.

What an exciting night we had!

As the previous blog posts have mentioned, we anchored at Orona two days ago, and the plan was to stay there until tomorrow morning.

This morning, we woke up to french toast and bacon courtesy of Jared. We left for New Bedford at 8:45 and we arrived at the Whaling Museum around 9:45. Liz met us there and gave us a tour of some of the exhibits, including a ⅓ scale model of a whaling ship.

We arrived at Orona yesterday afternoon after an unforgettable time on Kanton.  Today started around 6am with a beautiful sunrise and tasty chocolate chip pumpkin pancakes.  After some quick chores, our watch group packed up the small boat and made our way over to the beach.

SEA Semester in the NEWS
Evidence and patterns of tuna spawning inside a large no-take Marine Protected Area, Scientific Report
Tuna are Spawning in Marine Protected Areas, MIT News

Can protected marine sanctuaries like the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA) benefit highly migratory species, like tuna? That’s the topic of a report recently published in Scientific Reports.

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.