FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 19, 2009
CONTACT: Molly Dannenmaier
Director of Marketing and Public Relations,
409-765-7834

Texas A&M University at Galveston Students Learn to Maintain, Sail, Elissa for University Credit

Crew for Annual Sea Trials of Restored Tall Ship Will Include Maritime Studies Undergraduates from Pelican Island Campus

Galveston Historical Foundation’s restored 1877 sailing vessel Elissa, the Official Tall Ship of Texas, will take to the Gulf of Mexico for her annual series of Sea Trials from Friday, March 20 to Saturday, March 28. Among her volunteer sailing crew will be five students from Texas A&M University at Galveston (TAMUG) who have learned sailing-ship maintenance and sail-handling as part of the Maritime Studies curriculum at the university. It is the latest form of a long relationship between TAMUG and GHF.

In 1981 and 1982, as GHF’s restoration of the 1877 iron sailing cargo vessel was racing to completion, students at the university’s Pelican Island campus were among the large group of volunteers working with professionals from around the country to get the vessel opened as a maritime museum and a fully functioning square rigger, and then to learn to sail her.

Twenty-eight years later, the vessel is still alive and still sails with a trained volunteer crew who spend hundreds of hours throughout the year keeping her in sailing condition. A&M students are still part of the crew, but now for credit.

“Learning to maintain and crew a 19th-century square rigger is certainly not a usual activity for a college student,” said Tom Oertling, who organized and teaches the class, “but it offers a lot of training and insight that will serve these students well, whether or not they end up in maritime careers.”

Oertling, who was an avid Elissa volunteer himself in the 1980s, now teaches Underwater Archeology and Coastal Cultures at TAMUG. The Elissa Seamanship Training course is offered as part of the Freshman Experience program at A&M, designed to provide exposure to diverse aspects of maritime culture within the Maritime Studies Program, the only one at A&M Galveston that offers a liberal arts degree.

“This is the first time we’ve done Seamanship Training as a formal, for-credit unit,” said Oertling. “We got a good response, and expect the program to grow. But we’ve had some unusual challenges in this start-up year, beginning with the closing of the Pelican Island campus due to Hurricane Ike.

TAMUG students were relocated to College Station, but Oertling continued the classroom section of the program there, using Elissa’s extensive training manual as the textbook. The course consists of a fall and spring semester, coordinating with Elissa’s training and sailing schedule, with four hours of class work per week and eight hours of hands-on training and ship’s maintenance work every other week in the Sail Training sessions.

In spite of the disruption caused by Ike, most of the students have been able to fulfill the required work, although some were not able to continue when the TAMUG campus moved to College Station for the rest of the fall semester. In all, five students will be sailing with Elissa during this month’s Sea Trials, distributed among the regular crew throughout the days Elissa sails.

For more information, call (409) 763-1877 or visit the Texas Seaport Museum online at www.tsm-elissa.org or Galveston Historical Foundation at www.galvestonhistory.org.