News

Tuesday June 9, 2026
Woods Hole, MA
6:30 PM

Camryn Hartigan interviews her fellow student Celeste Giannoulias after an exceptionally full day: Marine Environmental History class in the morning, a walking tour of Woods Hole with the director of the Woods Hole Museum, and then a ride on the ferry to take in a bit of Martha’s Vineyard!

Hello, what’s your name and where are you from?

Hi, I’m Celeste, I’m from New York City, and I go to Yale. I’m a rising junior. I study ecology and evolutionary biology.  

What drew you to SEA in the first place, to this program? 

So I did a high school program; I did the SEA pre-college program, and I really enjoyed it. But it was land-based, and we never got to go on the ship. So that’s really what I wanted out of this program, and we just got back yesterday from 10 days out at sea, and it was pretty awesome!

Do you have any stories, like a favorite moment?

Other than going aloft–which was also awesome, they really let us go crazy, like climbing up in the rigging and stuff. I mean all clipped in, of course!

But other than that my favorite memory was probably the last night. We had a talent show called “Swizzle” and the chef makes this special [non-alcoholic] drink that’s, like, I don’t know a unique concoction each time. Everyone signs up for an act. Sarah and Max were our MCs, and they did a great job. We had a whole box of “confessions” that people wrote about things they still didn’t know or things they’d overheard and stuff. There were a few really great acts. Two of the crew sang this song on banjo, which was really pretty. I played the fiddle with Tammy, another crew member. Yeah, that was probably my favorite memory. And the sunset was just beautiful.

And Camryn read her children’s book that she published! Which is amazing art, so go get that if you haven’t yet.

Ha, ha, ok, thank you. And so as you said we got off the Corwith Cramer yesterday. Where are we now?

As you might be able to tell from my sweatshirt, we are in Martha’s Vineyard. We had a tour of Woods Hole earlier today and then one of the things that as a group we wanted to do was to hop on the ferry and go to Martha’s Vineyard, which we did. And we walked around and got ice cream and then we sat down at a tavern and each ordered a cup of clam chowder and nothing else. So it was a great meal. Right now we’re on the ferry. We’re about to head back to Woods Hole.

Before the walking tour we had class with Brooke, reflecting on our time on the ship. I’m wondering what’s standing out to you about what you’ve learned through our time at sea in relation to whale conservation, the history of whaling? 

Well, one of the things that I think we got by being on the boat was just this close-up view of whales that I’d never gotten before. I’d been on one whale watching boat before, but there was this one instance where the whales came like super close to us. Like not even a boat length away, maybe about 10 or 15 feet away. It was this mother and calf, and they just stayed there,  logging at the surface. We could hear them breathing. And that was really magical. I think that once you’ve kind of seen and experienced that you’ve got to care about the sea and all the animals.