By MJ Pramik
USS Hornet conducts spook maneuvers.
Darkness hangs opaque around me. I hover close to my crewmates assembled tonight on the USS Hornet, berthed in Alameda, California. We all breathe aloud as heaviness fills the air. I ask oceans of questions to keep any lingering spirits at bay. I’ve joined an evening “History, Mystery Tour” [...]

By Lance Mason
An unscripted chapter at sea.
I’d looked forward to this day since the previous New Zealand winter, when I bought the boat ticket in Dunedin. Now it was August again, and I found myself at the Antwerp dockyards about to board a small, rust-encrusted Polish Ocean Lines freighter, the Czaszki, for a two-week [...]

By John Girard
For the first four months of this year I voyaged around the world with 600 college students as part of the Semester at Sea program. The experience of traveling with so many young, optimistic, and inquisitive adventurers was an amazing opportunity. For many of these young people, this [...]

By Leena Tailor
It’s 4 a.m. on the Carnival Imagination, midway between Miami and the Bahamas, and two Backstreet Boys are giving an impromptu but heartfelt lecture on love, marriage, sharks and Twitter to a handful of fans who stumbled upon the duo while ending their drunken night at the pizzeria.
One is dressed [...]

By Robin Cerwonka
Why did I go to Antarctica? A good question, considering the warm-weather joys of the world—the thousands of tropical beaches I’d love to lie on and coral reefs I’ve never scuba dived. The list goes on; I have never:
-Seen any of the seven wonders of the world
-Faced a [...]

By Pamela Mandel
I slumped back into my chair, overwhelmed. My seat at the window faced the stern, we were sliding past giant blue glaciers, their cracked faces a wall above the blue black mirror of the Lemaire Channel. I felt oddly sad, all of a sudden, like I might cry, though sad [...]

By Catherine Watson
I’m startled, now that I am writing this, at seeing the many links to the sea in my life. And to exile.
When I was eight, my heart’s desire was to run away to sea and be a cabin boy on a clipper ship. There was a lot wrong with this plan – [...]

By Laura Lee Huttenbach

An unprepared trek up Mt. Kilimanjaro turns into an adventure of a lifetime.

“If you ever make it home from Africa alive, I’m going to kill you myself,” said my mom. She wasn’t happy with my decision to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro without an oxygen supply.
“But Mom,” I said, “it was [...]

By Mary Jo McConahay
Floating in a Beat-Up Canoe
Yellow-headed swallows dipped in and out of thick mist resting on the river. That fog probably followed the water’s curve for miles, I thought, maybe the whole length of Belize. I won’t see a thing from the boat.
Atop a high bank overlooking the Macal, I [...]

by Kim Brown Seely
A Girls’ Trip to Italy
Men have their golf weekends, their guided fly-fishing, and that ultimate male-bonding ritual, the heli-ski week, which costs practically as much as a child’s education.  But when it comes time for women to get away, we often sabotage ourselves with convenient excuses.  As a [...]