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Schooner Sets Sail with Students
by Victoria Parsons & Buzz Kelly

She's so beautiful it makes your heart leap - a giant, graceful white stallion racing over the waves just a few miles offshore. With all her working sails flying - jib, jumbo, foresail, mainsail and main gaff-topsail - and filled with a salty Gulf breeze, the schooner Daniel Webster Clements cruises rail-down across the azure waters at a surprising speed.

Every inch of her 72 feet, from bowsprit (the pointy end) to taffrail (the blunt end), is made of wood: Southern Mississippi pine for her tall twin masts and assorted spars, yellow pine for her frames, hull and planking, and white oak for flooring and cabin doors. Even the blocks for her running rigging are wood, just as they would have been 200 years ago. And although she is a reproduction, based upon the "Biloxi" schooners which once plied the cargo routes along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida, she is as authentic a vessel as can be found anywhere.

But she is prized for more than the beauty of her lines and the joy of her sailing speed: She is a floating laboratory, a sailing classroom, the official schoolship for the City of Sarasota, and a bold experiment in teaching kids about the importance of protecting aquatic environments.

"The bottom line is that we are all stewards of the environment and the quality of our lives depends upon the quality of the environment we live in," Robert Killian, director of education, tells students from Trinity Charter School in Tampa. "Everything is interdependent and interconnected with everything else, and humans - as the most intelligent beings on the planet - must take responsibility for maintaining those interconnections."

A folk singer, Killian worked with the legendary Pete Seegar, whose tall ship, the Clearwater, began sailing the Hudson River in 1969. The on-board educational program, which has reached more than 400,000 students and thousands of adults over the past 30 years, helped galvanize support for the Clean Water Act of 1972.

Now a resident of Sarasota, Killian joined forces with Peter Seyffert, a former yacht broker, and Joe Jacobson, a long-time boat builder and environmental specialist with Sarasota County's Environmental Services, to create the non-profit Aquarian Quest. They lease the ship from a corporation controlled by Bill Campbell of Destin.

Three-hour cruises, from St. Petersburg's Bayboro Harbor, Regatta Point Marina in Palmetto and the U.S. Coast Guard station in Nokomis, are packed with learning experiences from history and navigation to the difference between phytoplankton and zooplankton. "Everyone who comes aboard this ship learns something," notes Seyffert, who has sailed all over the world and raised two children on a yacht.

The cruise starts with a short history lesson, reminding students that ships were the primary method of transportation in the days before automobiles and interstate highways. Cargo packets like the Daniel Webster Clements carried crops and fish to market and brought back news of the world.

Once underway, students divide into four groups for hands-on instruction in navigation, water quality, fish and plankton. "Water covers three-quarters of the world, how much of it is fresh?" asks Kate Ciembronowicz, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist working onboard as a volunteer. After a few guesses, her students learn that only about 3% of the world's water is fresh, and that two-thirds of that water is tied up in ice on the polar caps.

One experiment has students measuring the level of dissolved oxygen in a sample of water from Tampa Bay. Scooping water from a bucket and adding various chemicals, students decide that there is enough oxygen in that sample to support fish life - and also learn that excess nutrients limit available oxygen.

At the plankton station, they scoop the goopiest of goop from the bottom of a seine net and examine it under microscopes and magnifying glasses to learn more about the critters living in Tampa Bay. "Plankton are the basis of the food chain," notes Jim Sloan, one of the ship's professional crew who also works as a volunteer teacher. "Without plankton, we wouldn't have fish."

Plankton also supplies most of the oxygen in the world - both under water and in the air we breathe, adds Killian, teaching the section on fish. "Most of the oxygen in the world comes from the ocean because that's where most of the plants in the world live," he says.

The seventh graders in this group of students already understood the principles of photosynthesis, but sometimes that becomes part of a class too. "We work with students from the third to the 12th grade so we gear every class to the needs of the students onboard that day," Killian said.

Adults are welcome aboard too, for relaxing sunset cruises or educational events like those the students enjoy. The cost for 45 people is $695, which works out to about $15 a head. "Some groups use the trip as a fundraiser, because they can easily sell tickets for $25," Seyffert said. "Other groups sell tickets and donate the difference to us so we can take out children who couldn't afford to go otherwise."

For more information, visit www.aquarianquest.org or contact Killian at 941-587-9313.

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