Welcome to Ocean Challenge!
Six years ago, we founded Ocean Challenge, Inc. to link adventures, expeditions and events to students in classrooms and families at home.
Adventures are potent teaching tools. They are: personal in nature, thus promoting a bond between the adventurers and classroom students or families; uncertain in outcome, thus dramatic and engaging; and multidisciplinary in content, thus engaging many interests.
And because adventures are real people doing real things in real time with real consequences, they demonstrate the active application of subjects which normally remain dry and passive on a textbook page. These programs come alive in the classroom or home because they are alive in the real world!
Our first project linked hundreds of classrooms and homes to The Voyage of Great American in our quest to break the 76 day 6 hour sailing record set in 1853 by the clipper Northern Light from San Francisco to Boston around treacherous Cape Horn.
The voyage was to prove a disaster. In 60' seas and 85 knots of wind, just 400 miles short of Cape Horn, Great American capsized. An hour later, in an unheard of occurrence in sailing history, the big trimaran was righted by what must have been an utterly monstrous and violent wave. A miraculous rescue happened in the dark of the next midnight, as the giant containership New Zealand Pacific rescued Steve Pettengill and me from the awash Great American.
18 days later we arrived in Holland, flew home to Boston, and then discovered, through visits to schools, how much the students had been "into" our journey. The learning that had spilled out of our multi-disciplinary voyage had been fantastic, and had proved our concept. I resolved to try for the record again.
We expanded our reach into classrooms by creating in partnership with newspapers, a new vehicle within their Newspaper in Education programs. In 12 major newspapers, we reached thousands of classrooms and millions of readers with a 14 part series of articles written from the boat far at sea and published in each paper. Each week, when the article was published, that newspaper was delivered to the participating classrooms, who had been delivered a specially written Teacher's Guide for the voyage.
Furthermore, we had convinced the online computer service Prodigy that they had the perfect technology with which to engage the public in our adventure. Interaction would be rapid, personal, exciting and informative. Over 200,000 of their subscribers tuned in as we raced around Cape Horn. It was a pioneering and truly interactive feature [jump: ocean challenge].
I was privileged to be skipper of Great American II for that voyage, and proud of two achievements: our record-breaking run of 69 days 20 hours for the 15,300 mile voyage, and the fact that our school program was hugely successful (every NIE program was oversubscribed by teachers) and our home program through Prodigy was similarly "spectacular", in the words of our Prodigy contacts.
It was our hope that that adventure for us would become an adventure for our students and families. And in visiting dozens of classes and giving dozens of lectures afterward, I was amazed at how they took our voyage to heart and learned from it. The response was beyond our wildest dreams. We resolved to produce further programs focusing on other marvelous learning adventures.
Two years ago, we joined forces with a wonderful program called Class Afloat. Class Afloat ran its school at sea aboard the tall ship Concordia, and we at Ocean Challenge produced our onshore program Class Afloat: Concordia Sails the World, to link thousands of classrooms and homes in the U.S. and South Africa to her voyage.
In that first voyage, Concordia sailed west from Vancouver to visit Hawaii, the Solomon and Marshall Islands, Australia, and Bali, before crossing the Indian Ocean to visit Diego Garcia Island, Mombassa, Durban and Capetown, South Africa. Into and across the Atlantic Ocean, Concordia visited Namibia, Brazil, the Amazon, West Indies, Norfolk, New York, and Boston. Whew, what a journey!
Upon arrival in Boston, over a thousand students came to visit the ship and meet the students whom they had followed around the world and through whose eyes they had seen the world. The power and inspiration of bringing reality into the classroom was shown to us yet again, as our onshore students swarmed Concordia's students, now regarded as friends who had come home from the sea.
Last year, Concordia sailed east from Boston, across the Atlantic, through the Mediterranean, into the Red Sea and Indian Ocean and stopping in Durban at the end of their first semester. Then they proceeded east for Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific Islands, before returning to Seattle.
And now Concordia, with 33 new students aboard, is at sea again, this time sailing west from San Diego. I'm certainly enjoying watching and learning from this group of high school students who are aboard for the circumnavigation. What a wonderful opportunity they have on board, and, in fact, we have in our homes or classrooms, to watch and learn from them.
Thanks for stopping into our site. We hope that you will be a regular visitor, and we look forward to marveling at their remarkable journey with you.
Welcome Aboard!
Rich Wilson
President, Ocean Challenge, Inc.