Amelia has always loved the ocean. Maybe it was because it was something she didn’t have growing up in Kansas, but she wanted to be a marine biologist from a very young age. As a teen her grandmother came into her life. She was a sailor and gave Amelia the opportunity to see the ocean for the first time, and to sail on Pride of Baltimore II. The following is Amelia’s experience in her own words.
Sailing on Pride II was the most magical experience of my life. It changed everything for me. I had never really enjoyed school because you just learn about concepts, and it doesn’t really seem to matter. You know what I mean? You learn a little bit about everything, but not much about anything. And it’s not applied. Not real.
I still think about how sailing feels when you first step into it. I remember stepping on the boat for the first time and feeling like a complete idiot. You look around and you see all these people and they know what they’re doing and you’re just there. This was a world I’d never been to before, nothing I’d ever been taught.
We started in Baltimore, and we sailed to Lunenberg, Canada. It was the most fun I’ve ever had. It was so fun! As time went on, it was the most rewarding way to be learning because I could apply the things I learned immediately. I used them every day and I started to feel like I had a flow with the other people that I worked with.
I think one of the best parts about boats is the people, because everybody’s so interesting. I don’t think anybody that works in this industry is boring or has a boring story. They all have crazy talents that you wouldn’t expect, and they’re all just unique, and different, and quirky.
After a while I understood things about science that I had never understood before I stepped on the boat, like physics and pulleys. It was fascinating and I really enjoyed that part of it because it made me feel like on a boat, you’re kind of like a renaissance man. They want you to do a little bit of everything. You learn about carpentry, about what kind of lines you use, how you don’t call it rope, you call it line. And I learned how to lift sails, and how everybody has to pull with their hips, not with their back. It’s just really cool and really rewarding.
I felt useful, you know what I mean? I felt like I was doing something that was an important part of what everybody was doing. I remember one night we had four-hour shifts and mine was the night shift. I went up on deck and I was not feeling good, but the first mate told me to get up to the steering wheel and I was like, “I don’t know if you should trust me with that.” And he’s like, “I trust you.” And it was amazing.
I live in a place where I can get to rural areas, but I have never seen as many stars as I did when I was out on the boat. When we went out, I couldn’t see land. It kind of looked like we were in a giant bowl. At night I could actually see the Milky Way, which I’ve never been able to see before. There were shooting stars every two seconds! When I looked overboard all I could see at night was the outline of our ship because it was disrupting bioluminescent animals that kind of made it look like we were sailing on stars.
That was my favorite moment, I think, when we were sailing at night. I could see the waves because of the bioluminescence. I don’t know if anybody’s ever seen “Treasure Planet”, but they basically sail in outer space and that’s kind of what it felt like. That was the most miracle-esque experience. I had never seen anything like that. It looked like a picture that NASA would send out that special cameras had to get because humans couldn’t see it.
I had been interested in marine biology since I was 11, but I’d never considered it a possibility, honestly. Once I was out on the ocean, I realized that maybe I wanted to sail more than I wanted to study what was under the water—but I think they go hand in hand.
So now I’m a junior studying marine biology in Hawaii. In my head, there’s just so many ways I could go, but I think I want to work on research vessels, which was influenced by my time on Pride II. So yeah, I want to work on boats that go out and do research, I think.
If I was going to tell someone what to expect from an experience like this, it would be to expect a family. Expect support and encouragement and expect just to be okay with learning something new. Expect to learn more than you’ve ever learned in your life. Think about how you should live your life and what it should be. I learned more in those two weeks than I had learned in all of my years in school. And it was the most rewarding thing I’d ever done because in school, when you learn something, you pass a test or something, but this, when you learn something, pass or fail, you go on adventures and it’s really cool.
I did work on a boat after Pride. It was the summer of 2022. I worked on Adventure in Gloucester, Massachusetts as a deckhand. I only worked on Adventure for the summer, so it was about two months, but it was amazing. I loved it.
Amelia
Student
February 2024
