GRADUATION SPEECH

Photo Credit: Jackson Stevens

How do you measure the extent to which one adventure impacts the individual? Is it through the amount of strange new lands they encounter on their travels, or through the score of challenges that they face and overcome over the course of the trip? Perhaps it is all of these things. For the past four months as students living and working aboard the Harvey Gamage, we have overcome more challenges than we thought possible, and we have become a cohesive group that has faced everything from soles and bowls to seasickness, as well as intimidating likes and the chaos of the second’s line. And through it all we have been learning and growing: learning how to live and work closely with others, and growing into new people who have seen just a little more and whose hands now show rough callouses acquired by working at sea, more prominently than the hands of that excited, and perhaps scared teenager who stepped off that plan on January 26, into the hot stifling, blinding sun of St. Thomas. I talked earlier about challenges and I think most everyone will agree with me when I say that the biggest challenge we will have to face on this trip will also be the last one we face as a group, and that is leaving. Because here we found something, a closeness, a sense of tolerance and family we would not and could not acquire anywhere else. Together we have seen tall mountain peaks and slain countless dragons side by side. It will be hard to explain to people back in the “real world” how, for the past four months, the place you considered “home”, the place where your heart was and where you felt most comfortable, was right here, surrounded by your shipmates and the sea.

Frank, Vinalhaven, ME