The cry rings out on a blustery moonlit night in the mid-Pacific. We are under sail near the equator in the middle of the largest ocean in the world, and a squall is bearing down on our tall ship, the 135-foot Robert C. Seamans. Even if it is an ungodly 3 a.m., we need to lower some sail, and fast.
I and my six watchmates lurch toward the foredeck. Some of us reach for the sheets and halyard, others struggle out onto the bowsprit, clipping on with their safety harnesses as the spray flies and the bow pitches violently up and down.
“Strike the jib topsail!”
The sail comes down with a rustling rush, wind whipping the fabric and snapping the lines, turning the balky canvas into an untamed beast. As a cold rain envelopes the ship, we struggle to wrestle the topsail into a makeshift furl before straggling back to the quarter deck to await the next order.
Blind obedience it wasn’t. In the seafaring era of the likes of Magellan and Drake, failure to heed the captain’s order might result in a flogging. On this particular voyage, it might result in a flunk—big consequences when you’re a college student whose GPA hinges on what happens on the Seamans.
Students will do the damnedest things. Imagine a bunch of college kids willingly giving up sex, drugs and rock and roll for the dubious privilege of six weeks of ocean sailing, some of it spent puking their guts out in hostile weather as they voyage some 3,800 miles around the remote atolls of the Pacific known collectively as Oceana.
Why would they forsake their iPods for the whistling winds of Aoleus? For 17 college credits, that’s why. It’s an educational pact with Neptune run by the Woods Hole, Massachusetts-based Sea Education Association and known as a “SEA semester,” but with all its rigor it deserves a spot in the growing pantheon of extreme sports. If cave diving, kite surfing, and sport climbing qualify, why not extreme learning on the high seas? It takes more than guts, brawn and skill; it takes brains, too.
“The gulp factor is considerable,” said Chris McGuire, the 36-year-old ship’s captain who has a tattoo from Fiji on his left ankle and thousands of nautical miles under his sandal-clad feet. “We ask the kids to do more than they can possibly do and in the end they end up doing what to them was unthinkable: running the ship and all the scientific experiments.”
Russell Chaput, at the helm of Seamans in his bright blue shorts and sleeveless white T-shirt, is a case in point. His considerable black hair was shorn into a mohawk during the ritualistic frenzy that marked our crossing the equator into the Southern Hemisphere. An energetic psychology and criminal justice major at Roger Williams College in Rhode Island, Chaput has the gift of gab, and on this day he is waxing forth about SEA’s program, from which some 7,000 college students have graduated.
Along with his shipmates, Russ stands a designated watch (six hours by day, four by night), to fulfill the academic and nautical requirements.
He may find himself on deck watch, steering the ship or tending its array of nine sails rigged with some 75 downhauls, halyards, outhauls and assorted other lines. Or he may be assigned to the galley to help prepare, cook and clean up the three square meals and three snacks a day served to the nearly three dozen mates. Or he may be asked to plot the ship’s course using celestial navigation (No GPSers need apply!), or learn how to keep the 455-horsepower engine, two desalinization watermakers, the marine sanitation device and all other machinery running smoothly.
“I love this stuff,” Russ said, gripping the spokes of the wooden wheel as the boat powered northeast toward Hawaii under the four lower sails. “I can’t get enough of it. It’s the lab I can’t take.”
Ah, the lab. The science. The extreme core of the extreme curriculum.
It’s called ocean studies, and the students jokingly refer to it as “throwing expensive maritime equipment overboard” at the whim of chief scientist Gary Jaraslow. He is an affable teacher who serenades the various scientific deployments with the strains of his blues harp. The devices range from nets to current, motion, and bottom profiling gear to water and geological sampling devices.
All these are used to extract data that might provide clues from some of the remotest aquatic spots in the world about issues like global warming, climate change, fisheries decline and coral bleaching. Important big-picture stuff, but for the kids it means something more immediate: round the clock hours in the on-deck laboratory, collecting and researching data, doing projects and papers, and trying to perform hundred-counts of tiny seagoing organisms while peering into a bouncing microscope—an endeavor guaranteed to turn the hardest iron-belly inside out, preferably on the leeward rail.
“There is an actual amount of character to be gained from misery,” McGuire said of the arduous lab tasks that are part of the intentional pressure of the program, a calculated test of endurance under adversity. “If you feel like you’re treading water and almost going under, then I’m doing my job. If you’re drowning, we should talk.”
You won’t find social engineering mentioned in SEA’s course catalog, but it might as well be. How else to describe throwing 22 college kids together in a confined space for 38 days, making them do all the work and study too, and expect them to not only get along but work as a well-oiled machine?
In the end, as in the beginning, the ship is a great leveler. So too is the ban on the kinds of high-tech gear kids are plugged into these days, electronic stuff that can help pass the hours while boosting their persona and their popularity. Leave your cell phones, Palm Pilots, Internet connections and CD players at home. No booze either. And no “exclusive relationships,” the onboard euphemism for hooking up.
Geez, you might as well rename the Seamans the good ship Abstinence. There she sets, chock full of the buff bodies of young adults living in sardine-like conditions, intimate without intimacy, and sailing tantalizingly close to some of Gaughin’s favorite topless beaches in Tahiti. Can you believe it?
“You know, I didn’t even miss it,” said Christopher Rydz, a chemistry and religion major at Wisconsin’s Ripon College, of the banned hedonistic and amorous pursuits. “It just didn’t matter. We were too hot and tired to care.”
Ah, the lab. The science. The extreme core of the extreme curriculum.
Geez, you might as well rename the Seamans the good ship Abstinence. There she sets, chock full of the buff bodies of young adults living in sardine-like conditions, intimate without intimacy, and sailing tantalizingly close to some of Gaughin’s favorite topless beaches in Tahiti. Can you believe it?