ClassAfloat Sets Sail for World Voyage
Posted by calebpifer on September 4, 2006
For many, it would be a dream come true – sailing around the world on a beautiful tall ship, while earning academic credits along the way.
This past summer found me in British Columbia, Canada working for ClassAfloat on the 188ft. tall ship S/V Concordia. Working for ClassAfloat has always been my personal pinnacle within the sail training industry. It is a very unique and innovative organization that takes high school students around the world while earning academic credits. It serves my belief that experiential learning can be combined with traditional academics to create an exceptional learning environment.
Concordia is effectively a floating high school equipped with regular classrooms and tools that would be found in any school in the United States or Canada. The organization was started in 1984 by a visionary educator in Montreal, Canada named Terry Davies. Terry was inspired by a proclamation that declared 1984 the International Year for Youth. The proclamation called on schools around the world to adopt three principles: participation, peace and development. Guided by these principles, Terry took the inaugural ClassAfloat class and sailed with them around the world on a chartered Polish tall ship named Pogoria. The Concordia was purposely built for the program in 1992 as a vessel designed for both school and long range sailing. She has creature comforts not found on most tall ships including a desalination plant and air conditioning below decks.
My position with ClassAfloat as Summer Shipboard Director was broad and varied. Initially I was hired to use my Outward Bound experience to create an adventure based program on Vancouver Island. However, due to some delays in the shipyard, my program was highly modified. In the end, I did everything from working in the yard, marketing and PR, and facilitating workshops for the new class of students. I was fortunate enough to work with the crew, train with the teaching staff during a five day period, and then finish with training students for another five days.
The teaching staff was very impressive. They were all Canadian except for one British teacher. Many of them were a few years older then me, and already possessed a plethora of life experiences and unique skill sets. Equally impressive was the student body of forty eight. Again, predominately Canadian, they were highly mature and well spoken for their respective ages – eleventh and twelfth grades, and gap year students (students in between high school and college).
I must say that it is never an easy task to leave a ship after you have spent a summer bonding with the crew. However, this summer has been even more intense as I got to know the professional crew, teachers, and students. They all wanted me to stay for the voyage almost as much I did. It is very deflating when you leave on a plane to fly back to mundane college classes; while your new friends and colleagues leave the next day to sail around the world!
This year’s voyage will take the ship from Vancouver to Hawaii, then on through the South Pacific to Australia. The ship will then sail to Singapore, and break for the second semester and holiday period. Second semester begins by sailing through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean, along the North Coast of Africa, then up into southern Europe, through the Straight of Gibraltar and into the Atlantic, finally finishing in Poland via the Baltic. The voyage will take a total of tens months, and the ship will call on twenty four countries along the way.
One of the hallmarks of ClassAfloat is to connect the students academics onboard with foreign world cultures in each port. This year the students will engage in twenty four separate shore excursions designed to showcase the country’s cultures and its people. Past shore excursions have included everything from trekking across the Serengeti Desert, climbing through Viet Cong tunnels in Vietnam, participating in a traditional banana leaf pit barbecue on Easter Island, to staying in native islanders’ grass huts in Fiji.
Starting next year ClassAfloat will undergo a large transformation. The organization has acquired both a land based school in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, and a chartered Polish tall ship named the Frederick Chopin. Students will then be split up by grade level – eleventh graders on for one semester, while twelfth graders will be on the second. The alternate semester will be spent in the land based school in Lunenburg. The gap year students will no longer sail on Concordia, as their new dedicated vessel will be the Chopin. These changes allow for improved academics in some subjects such as chemistry which is quite difficult to conduct lab work on the ship! Additionally, it will allow the ship to stay longer in each port including an extended stay over the holiday period in Dakar, Senegal for humanitarian relief work.
It is my hope to stay involved in some capacity with this great organization. In the meantime, I will have to live vicariously through the students and crew by reading their updates in each port on their website. Most importantly though, I can read the student’s journal entries online, and see their personal transformation and growth. In this way, I will feel connected to the voyage and be able to live my own dream of sailing around the world through the insights and experiences of forty eight amazing high school students.
www.classafloatunderway.org.
http://www.classafloat.com/
- Cal Pifer
