Programs Blog

March 24, 2025 

Time: 1735 

Location: SEA Campus, Woods Hole, MA, USA 

Weather: 8°C, Rainy with some fog  

Happy Monday from Falmouth. My name is Britney Durward. I go to school at Brock University in Ontario where I am a neuroscience major.  

This is our last week onshore and it’s surreal at this point. By next week we will be heading to Aotearoa New Zealand, where we will begin our offshore cruise track of the South Pacific. 

We’ve become a close-knit group in the last few weeks on shore. From a variety of fun-filled field trips to movie nights in the Madden Center, I think the biggest team building is the love we all have for food.  

Each night a group of two or three people cook dinner for their roommates in their respective cottage. It’s amazing to see the different dishes that each group makes. For all the Moms and Dads worried about us not eating well, don’t you worry: we are feasting. On Wednesdays, one cottage cooks the soup, and the other cottage makes the bread and salad.  It begins with a wonderful food idea written on the whiteboard to an ingredients list on the grocery list. If you forget to add something to the grocery list, well in that case you must get creative, but it’s always delicious and sometimes more fun this way. We had an abundance of lasagna noodles in the dry storage, so my cooking partner Olivia and I took on the role of making some lasagna. We managed to make three whole lasagnas with one of them being close to ten pounds. As this was not the shared meal between the two cottages, we decided to share a little bit of our leftovers. We will probably have lasagna up until we leave.  

As Easter approaches, we have been celebrating early with an array of sweet treats before we head off to the ship. Patricia made some sugar-lemon cookies. Ella graced us with her gooey chocolate chip cookies and Georgia with a pound cake. We microwaved some ‘Peeps’ marshmallows and enjoyed them during our community meeting last week.  

The other cottage braved the cold to make some kabobs and asparagus on the barbeque and boy were we jealous over in Bellatrix house. On Saturday we had “bring your own dinner” in A cottage, where we all gathered around a small laptop screen to watch our environmental communications videos on the history of Aotearoa.  

Today we had lunch with the SEA president Rick Hopper. We had a pizza lunch and Aimee brought everyone back donuts. Dinner making brings the whole house together with the smell of food and uncontrollable laughs. Although we won’t be the main cooks on the ship, the stewards make sure we have three meals and an endless number of snacks each day. Tonight’s menu is breakfast for dinner, a Monday favorite for both cottages. 

Shoutout: Thank you SEA for giving me the opportunity to be a part of such a wonderful team. Thank you to Mom and Dad for helping me live my educational dreams.