This past week in Charleston Harbor, a group of Proctor folk gathered for the send off of the Harvey Gamage and Proctor’s Ocean Classroom program. Students from Proctor and the MET Schools in Providence, RI prepared over the course of the last two weeks to learn to be mariners and how to collaborate with each other while helping to run a tall ship for the next 65 days. Led by Brooks Bicknell ‘77 in his final stint as Ocean Classroom director, the fall and winter versions of Ocean Classroom culminate with one of a kind lessons that students carry with them for the rest of their lives. 

Over the past two weeks, Proctor’s Ocean Classroom students have experienced life on the open waters. As they entered the Gulf Stream and sailed south, we caught up with the student crew through daily journal entries and photos. Read more from the past two weeks on Harvey Gamage below!

As with any ocean voyage, unexpected obstacles early in the term tested the crew's patience aboard the Harvey Gamage, however, the past two weeks of sailing, training, and educational experiences throughout the Gulf of Maine have quickly made up for lost time. As students learn to crew Gamage and begin to experience life at sea, their reflections in daily journal entries tell a powerful tale. Read more from the last two weeks on Ocean Classroom in the words of our students below! 

Pulling into Raymond, Maine, I passed by the Murch Cemetery. I filed the name in the back of my mind because of its homonym, thinking to myself, “I wonder what the Merch - hats and t-shirts -  from Murch looks like?”

Two and a half weeks ago, Ocean Classroom 2022 gathered on the docks of Mystic Harbor in Connecticut, ready to set sail for a term at sea. A last minute repair to the Harvey Gamage delayed their actual departure, allowing the student crew to spend a week aboard the tall ship Joseph Conrad before transferring up the coast to the Oliver Hazard Perry, a historic square rigged tall ship out of Newport, Rhode Island. As repairs continue aboard Gamage, Ocean Classroom continues to learn hard, valuable lessons in patience and persistence as they continue their marine biology, literature, and navigation studies at Camp Wohelo on Sebago Lake, Maine. 

In 1994, Proctor Academy pioneered a trimester at sea program for high school students unlike any independent school had done before. Twenty-nine years later, Ocean Classroom set sail from Mystic, Connecticut with 22 student crew members whose lives are about to be changed forever. 

The water churned along the walkway of the GulfQuest/National Maritime Museum of the Gulf of Mexico next to the Mobile River in Mobile, Alabama. Pockets along the river were filled with branches, leaves, and brackish detritus that pooled next to sea vessels that had been docked for what looked like more than a year. 

Proctor’s Winter Ocean Classroom program took on a new theme this year as we joined forces with the MET School of Providence, Rhode Island and Sailing Ships Maine to design a shared trimester at sea program that would sail from Charleston, South Carolina around Florida to Mobile, Alabama. Along the way, students from Proctor and the MET School studied historic Southern ports, involuntary servitude, and the lasting impact of slavery on both economic and social systems throughout America.