You share this adventure with fellow students, teachers and a professional captain and crew. Your education aboard ship continues in recognizable ways - classes everyday, books and homework, tests and quizzes, essays and research papers. After all, you're on a magnificent sailing ship, sailing the wide waters of the world. Marine science, maritime history, sea literature, and navigational math are studied in a thoroughly integrated curriculum. Each subject area is arranged to support and correspond with the others, concurrent with the voyage itinerary.
Students learn field techniques in marine biology and chemistry.
They take samples, make observations, and record collected data as part of a regular routine of duties and aboard ship. Students explore the relationship between the resources and vitality of a marine ecosystem and the activities of humanity, both historical and contemporary. This course of applied mathematics, designed to let students exercise mathematical principles in the real world. Students learn to use compass and sextant, and to reduce observations to lines of position on a nautical chart. Time and distance calculations, geometry of triangles and of spheres, vectors, and trigonometric functions are studied and applied in coastal piloting and celestial navigation.