SEAmester Student Diaries
"diaries sent from sea"

April 15, 2008

Tori Kleinbort
Sarah Lawrence College

After the four day sail from Trinidad to Santo Domingo we were all ready for a cold drink and a nice shower. We were also excited to go to a major city for really the first time on the trip. Professor Petrillo had taught us that Santo Domingo was the oldest city in the Americas and we dove right in. From the moment we stepped foot the boat we were surrounded by Latin American culture. It was a major culture shock to not be able to speak English, especially when we tried to clear customs. The captain used my broken high school Spanish to try and communicate that in fact we did not need to pay $700 to enter the country and we were successful! Once ashore we were greeted by poor children offering to shine shoes, street vendors selling everything from paintings to fruit, big brand name stores both authentic to the DR and ones from home and a million different places to see. While we spent a significant amount of our time on El Conde which is the main pedestrian walkway calling home and enjoying Cuban sandwiches we also did a fair amount of sight-seeing. Everything there is so well preserved we were in shock as we walked around and visited places like La Primera Cathedral De Las Americas and the Bartolome De Las Casas chapel. We were given a behind-the-scenes tour of the National Museum of Natural History by Peter Sanchez, a curator friend of our professor Chris Hamilton's. Also, we docked right outside of Diego Columbus's (Christopher's brother) house on the Rio Ozama.

After our shore freedoms and some rest we were back to sea. We were thrown a curve ball and switched up watches the students of A watch became B watch, B became C and so on. This meant that we would have a different deckhand and watch officer. In my case I went from the second mate to the third mate and it is amazing how different people can do the same thing so vastly different. Mentally this next passage was the hardest passage to prepare for, knowing we may not be on land again for almost two weeks. Once underway it was easy for us to fall back into the swing of things. For the first time no one was seasick on the first day of the voyage which everyone especially Bailey was happy about. The sail was fairly smooth the first couple of days until it started raining. We thought we were just going to hit a few squalls and be fine, no such luck. During the last two days in the Windward Passage getting around Cuba we had force 6 and 7 winds fighting against us. We called all hands call to double reef the main which Professor Petrillo later told us he had never seen happen during the five years he had been doing SEAmester. Most of the students were below for the worst part of the weather, lucky for me, I was not one of them. I was on watch while a wave came and knocked the legs out from under my watch officer, deckhand and I while doing dishes. No one was hurt but our small boats came dislodged and we had to get all the crew to come lift them into their holding cells again.

Once we were out of the bad weather we made a stop in Anguilla Cay (a part of the Bahamas). We went ashore on this deserted island where we did geology field work on the beach with Professor Hamilton. We then were free to roam around and have our own Lord of the Flies experience. While out looking for driftwood for the night's bonfire we encountered a sand shark and a baby scorpion (which was really amazing up close)! We built a fire and found some old buckets which we later used as drums for a "hippie drum circle". Professor Hamilton did a fire spinning performance and we cooked over the fire as well. The next morning we went back to the boat just in time for it to start pouring which delayed our departure for about 2 hours. Then it was back to sea for another five days. This next sail was fairly uneventful. We celebrated the first mate's (Greg Bailey's) birthday with an amazing carrot cake which our fabulous cook made from scratch. We pulled into Fernandina, Florida after a day of playing sea tag with the Harvey Gamage our sister ship. We met up with them at Cumberland Island to have a cook out. We spent most of the night on the island getting to know the high school students who were on the Harvey Gamage for four months, mostly comparing notes on our two programs. We decided that we got the better deal (fewer rules). In the morning we toured the Harvey Gamage to see another tall ship. It is a really beautiful ship, but, we lucked out with getting Spirit of Massachusetts as she really is an amazing ship. We motored over to St. Mary's, GA and spent a few days getting caught up on laundry and provisioning the ship. The people here are extremely welcoming. It was a bit of a culture shock to go from a deserted island to southern hospitality. Our second day here we took Bailey, Mary and Barron's parents canoeing through the Okefenokee Swamp. It was amazing, alligators were everywhere and there were water crawling spiders all over the place. Alex and I did a fair amount of racing with the other canoes and according to us… we won. Today we went to the library to do some long overdue research for our history projects. Tomorrow we visit Cumberland Island again for geology and biology field studies after which we are bound for Beaufort, North Carolina.