Departing Woods Hole and Bound for Sea!

Our time in Wood’s Hole has come to an end, and we must say goodbye to the SEA campus. Over the course of the next week, we all will make our way to the other side of the planet to join the Robert C. Seamans in Auckland, NZ. While many of us are returning home to see our families, friends and partners, others are going straight to New Zealand or spending some time in Hawaii. Many of us will be arriving early in New Zealand to go “excursioning,” and many of us will be sharing a hostel with one another in Auckland.

The shore component came to a close on Thursday when we had a midterm for our Maritime History and Culture class, got to play with the top dog on campus, Gidget, one last time, and presented on various topics for Conservation and Management. Our topics for C&M ranged from sustainability at SEA, plastic pollution and the Trash Shouldn’t Splash campaign, invasive species, and marine spatial planning. Unfortunately Erin Bryant, our C&M professor will not be joining us on the Robert C. Seamans, but she will be staying behind to start working on implementing the suggestions made by the sustainability student group and the Trash Shouldn’t Splash student group. SEA takes its students input very seriously and works to implement our suggestions when possible.

We closed out Thursday by attempting to eat all of the food left in our houses so we wouldn’t have to throw much of it away. B house went so far as to combine all of their compostable foods in a large pot and dumped it into our compost pit. After some interesting meals and celebrating Marija’s birthday we all began to pack up our suitcases and clean up our houses.

Friday, we all woke up bright and early to Colleen and Maia knocking on our doors with donuts to motivate us to finish cleaning our houses and getting them ready for S-291 who arrive this coming week. After we finished cleaning our houses we headed up to the Madden Center for the last time and participated in our orientation for the sea component. Later we all said our farewells and went our separate ways until Auckland.
We would like to thank everyone who has made our time in Woods Hole run smoothly. Thank you to Virginia, Dale, Colleen, Maia, Jim and all of the other staff at SEA for taking care of us and making us feel at home.