The SSV Corwith Cramer is bigger on the inside. Clocking in at an impressive 134 feet from bowsprit to stern, somehow a multi-layered world also lives beneath the deck. There are navigation rooms, a laboratory, kitchen, dining room, makeshift library and more than 30 bunks to accommodate crew and students.

This summer, Sea Education Association's (SEA) Atlantic vessel has taken high schoolers on 12-day immersive voyages, where they learn how to sail, conduct oceanographic research, study maritime history and much more. Visitors were welcomed aboard Aug. 15 when the boat made port at Hodgdon Marina in Boothbay Harbor.

"Seeing students get excited about the ocean, that never gets old," said Chief Scientist and Oceanography Professor Jeff Schell, who's worked with SEA since the '90s.

The goal is to help students understand the ocean across disciplines: How its physics, chemistry and geology all coalesce. This includes collecting samples from the sea floor, towing nets at different depths to capture marine life, and gathering water for ocean pH, nutrient level and chlorophyll concentration testing. Schell's favorite is using a secchi disk to measure how deep sunlight penetrates the water column.

Attached to the wall in the lab, instruments continuously have seawater flowing through, allowing many of these ocean properties to be measured. Interesting critters also end up in the lab's aquarium, awaiting eventual release. Students just set free two baby lobsters caught as planktonic larvae at the start of the summer.

But oceanography isn't the only thing students learn aboard. In addition to experiencing the ins and outs of seafaring life from hoisting sails to food preparation, they're getting schooled in the blue humanities from Maritime historian M.J Fernandez. This field studies how human interactions with the ocean and other aquatic environments shape social and political practices. As Fernandez asserted, it's the ocean that connects us all.

"The ocean has its own culture, its own language and its own people. That's something that our students learn very quickly when they get on board. It's kind of like we hand them a whole new dictionary of words and terms that you would never use on land," she said.

Beyond discussing the unique culture fostered between mariners, SEA examines how coastal communities were shaped by cross-Atlantic exchange for better, and for worse. This fall, SSV Corwith Cramer is taking a trip south to dive deeper into the lasting connections between New England and the Caribbean. For example, the pineapple becoming a symbol for Newport, Rhode Island, is a byproduct of tropical fruit exportation, Fernandez explained. And salted cod is a staple Caribbean dish because fish that couldn't be sold in New England were preserved and sent to the islands.  

This course is one of SEA's undergraduate offerings. Touring the Corwith Cramer finds more than one crew member who began their SEA journey as a college student. Deckhand Nathan Miller, 28, had no sailing experience when he exchanged his Pennsylvania-based university for a floating campus. His motivator was getting to collect data himself; a special thing in the scientific world.

The sense of responsibility and the team effort required were formative for Miller, and many close friends were gained from that trip. Now, he has a hand in creating those memories for a young generation.

"It's really fun to be a facilitator between the natural environment and the student experience. It's our job to inspire people who are interested in this kind of thing, and the environment that we sail in makes it really easy to inspire."