On Thursday, the Grays Harbor Historical Seaport announced the 2018 launch of a new program, Sea School, which will offer courses to give students the skills to enter maritime sector careers at a time when the field is growing and qualified workers are hard to come by.

Seaport Executive Director Brandi Bednarik spoke before the Aberdeen City Council meeting Wednesday and talked about the need for qualified maritime workers. She said the maritime sector is one of the largest industries in the state at $21.4 billion and grows more than 6 percent a year; however, the median age of workers is 54 and few younger people seem to be aware of the maritime opportunities open to them when choosing a career.

Funded by a three-year, $512,000 grant from the Bellevue-based Magic Cabinet Foundation, the program will include full scholarships for up to 24 people each year to learn job skills, with the goal of 125 students trained over the first three years.

The Seaport has already been “chipping away” at the maritime worker shortage for nearly 30 years, training people up and down the West Coast on their two tall ships, the Lady Washington and Hawaiian Chieftain. Both of these vessels depend on volunteer sailors to fill out the crew roster, and people with no experience whatsoever get training as they travel. According to the Seaport, more than 100 of those volunteers have gone on to get professional US Coast Guard licensing to work in the commercial maritime industry.

“The maritime sector pays a family wage,” Bednarik said in a written statement. “The industry’s average salary in Washington is $70,000. Our goal with Sea School is to throw open doors to the industry to people who would otherwise have barriers. The scholarships available through this program will provide the opportunity to low income people, especially from coastal communities within Washington state similar to our home base of Grays Harbor County.”

Bednarik went on to say the program will also give populations not well-represented in the maritime industry – people of color, women, LGBTQ, tribal members – more options to earn family wage jobs at sea.

“This has always been a blue collar industry and we want to see that continue. Maritime work is something that anyone can succeed at if they work hard,” said Bednarik. “We are providing that first important step, which is a foot in the door. The impact of Sea School will be felt nationwide and is not limited to working on a vessel.”

Sea School trainees will join the experienced tall ship crew for a month or more at a time, living on the ship and working their way through a self-driven curriculum that combines training, daily hands-on practice, and comprehension tests. The vessels travel along the west coast year round, giving trainees the chance to experience near coastal passages, inland waterways, and different docking scenarios.

To develop the hands-on curriculum, the Historical Seaport has enlisted the talents of Curriculum Development Specialist Captain Sarah Herard, a seasoned mariner and graduate scholar at Central Michigan University studying training and development in education. Guest instructors will conduct specialty trainings such as life raft deployment and medical trainings, the end goal being to equip trainees for entry-level jobs on commercial vessels or in shipyards.

You may ask, how does working on a tall ship provide crucial training for the modern maritime industry?

“What many people don’t realize is that the fundamentals of being a good deckhand are very similar to what they have always been, even back in the eighteenth century,” shared Captain Ryan Downs, who himself got his start on the decks of Lady Washington. “We do have so many more electronic devices than our predecessors, but none of the knots have changed, none of the need for awareness of your surroundings has changed. We have our mariners on tugboats and cruise ships all over the world, using the seamanship skills they learned on tall ships.”

The program is slated to launch in summer of 2018. The first scholarship application window is set to open in the first half of 2018. Interested parties can sign up to hear alerts by subscribing to the Sea School email list or following Grays Harbor Historical Seaport on Facebook.