Making Waves with Nautical Education

“Join hands and work together, sail off into the blue! We are nautical voyagers!” Students and teachers from Yilan’s Yue Ming Elementary and Junior High School sing out from the decks of the sailing vessels Barefoot and Armola. 

In the summer of 2024, Yue Ming gathered students and teachers from schools on Taiwan’s coast and its outlying islands for a 1,939-kilometer, 29-day sailing voyage counterclockwise around Taiwan. Along the way, the kids learned about Taiwan’s coastal reefs, intertidal zones, and ecosystems. They even collected marine debris and made surveys of marine microplastics. Working with experts from the National Academy of Marine Research (NAMR), they also learned how to use oceanographic survey instruments. These hands-on activities helped the kids to better understand and protect Taiwan’s mother ocean, and to become true children of the sea. 

Protecting our seas

“Hey, what’s this? It looks like a UFO!” asks a curious child on the deck. It turns out to be a research device—a float buoy—brought on the trip by NAMR. Lai Jian-wu, a research fellow with NAMR’s Marine Industry and Engineering Research Center, smiles and tells us that the kids on board get to deploy these expensive research instruments themselves, which they do with a mix of caution and excitement. 

Given the space constraints on the boat, NAMR limited its survey equipment to devices to measure conductivity, temperature and depth (CTD), and levels of Vibrio vulnificus, a pathogenic bacterium. The former helped the kids understand ocean stratification, and how scientists use measurements of conductivity (which indicates salinity) and temperature, along with the speed and direction of ocean currents, to determine where a given mass of seawater has come from. For example, measurements of the seawater in the Kuroshio Current off Eastern Taiwan differ from those of seawater around Xiaoliuqiu off Taiwan’s west coast. Lai says, “The value of this voyage is that it enables the children to measure and see this for themselves, transforming textbook data into real-world experience.” 

In addition to NAMR’s scientific instruments, Yue Ming wove a dragnet for the boats to use to sample the distribution and variety of marine debris. Seeing the state of marine pollution for themselves made the kids want to protect the sea.

On Penghu, the young sailors observed green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas) hatchlings returning to the sea. They also saw flocks of black-tailed gulls (Larus crassirostris) at Matsu’s Dongyin Island and encountered dolphins in the Taiwan Strait. Sleeping on deck while sailing at night, they took in the stars filling the sky and the sound of the ocean waves. They enjoyed surprises and discoveries in every stage of their journey!

The route of Yue Ming’s 2024 voyage around Taiwan.

Children use a dragnet to collect marine debris, learning about the sea at first hand.

A scientist from the National Academy of Marine Research explains the function of a float buoy to the kids.

Sailing into the blue

“It took us 16 years to develop the capability to manage an educational ocean voyage on this scale.” Yue Ming principal Huang Chien-jung says that when he became the principal in 2007 the school had only 67 students and was on the verge of being closed. Believing that the nearby Wuweigang Waterbird Refuge and Wuweigang Wetland were valuable natural assets, he made ocean sustainability and environmental education central to the school’s development and incorporated sailing classes into its curriculum.

Yue Ming is the only school in Taiwan to make sailing a required part of its curriculum, and under Huang’s leadership it has continued to experiment. In 2018, a group of its teachers and students sailed from Su’ao across the Kuroshio Current to Japan’s Ishigaki Island, where they competed with young Japanese sailors before flying to Hong Kong for a youth sailing exchange.

In 2020, Yue Ming students and teachers set out from Su’ao on a 27-day-long relay sail around Taiwan, during which the kids had exchanges with students from coastal schools, cleaning up beaches with them and even inviting them aboard their boat. 

One Piece’s popularity among young people means that other schools’ students inevitably look a little envious when they meet kids from Yue Ming who are actual sailors. Huang promised himself that one day Yue Ming would take these other kids to sea, too, and in 2024 fulfilled his promise by bringing them aboard for segments of Yue Ming’s relay sail around Taiwan.

Yue Ming principal Huang Chien-jung brought ocean education to his campus, and hopes that his students will make the world their classroom. (photo by Kent Chuang)

Students from Yue Ming and from Penghu’s Wang An Primary School collect marine debris from their kayaks to protect the marine environment.

In 2024, Yue Ming included students from 36 schools in a sailing voyage around Taiwan.

What sailing teaches us

Yue Ming’s students begin learning to swim in first grade, sailing in third, bodyboarding in fourth, and snorkeling and kayaking in fifth. Huang says that it’s moving and rewarding for the adults to watch the kids grow. “We learn from the children.” He shares a parent’s video of a nine-year-old girl sailing a sailboat on her own, commending her for continuing to try even after the boat capsized. He tells us that though she used to cry in fear before every class, she was always the first one out on the water. Her parents would weep as they watched her sail out into the bay every morning because “she’s braver than we are.” 

Learning to sail is more than just a physical skill; it also teaches life lessons. 

For example, you don’t get anywhere if you try to sail directly into the wind. Instead, you tack back and forth in a zigzag pattern to make progress. Similarly, if you try to simply bull your way through the headwinds (adversities) you encounter in your life, you’ll end up black and blue. Instead, you need to gather yourself and figure out where to apply your energy. Huang adds that in sailing and in life, a following winds is the most dangerous, explaining that you are most prone to capsizing when a tailwind changes direction. This is partly because of the force of a strong wind at your back, and partly because a tailwind can make you become careless. 

But even when you have thoroughly prepared, unexpected problems can crop up. For example, Barefoot ran into trouble off Changhua during last year’s voyage. Though they’d studied the charts and had a pilot aboard, they didn’t know that the harbor entrance had silted up, dramatically altering the seafloor and causing them to run aground. Fortunately, the kids remained calm, followed the captain’s orders, and eventually freed the boat. Life too is filled with challenges, uncertainties and unknowns. Once overcome, they become stories to share with others. The kids who made this voyage will certainly have endless tales to tell!

To sail their Optimist dinghies, the kids have to learn to judge the wind and use their whole bodies.

A Yue Ming sailing class on Yilan’s Dongshan River. Learning to sail provides kids not only with nautical skills, but also the courage to face life’s difficulties. (photo by Kent Chuang)

Ocean education is etching maritime skills into the students’ DNA, making them into true “children of the sea.”

Making Friends around the World

The restrictions on access to the seashore in postwar Taiwan made the ocean a ­barrier. But the sea also connects us to the rest of the world. 

In 2018, Yue Ming students found a camera while cleaning a beach and posted about it on social media. To their surprise, the camera’s owner turned out to be a young Japanese woman named Serina Tsubakihara, who had lost it two years previously while diving in the ocean off Japan’s Ishigaki Island. The camera’s remarkable journey connected Yue Ming to Tsubakihara. She flew to Taiwan to collect her camera and meet the kids, and returned for their graduation ceremony the next year. Yue Ming then turned the story into a puppet play that toured schools in Taiwan, with each performance accompanied by a beach cleanup. The play even made its way to Japan, where it captured the public’s imagination. Because Su’ao and Ishigaki City are sister cities, Yue Ming’s students already had a connection to Ishigaki’s youth sailing clubs. Yue Ming principal Huang Chien-jung says that private sailing clubs drive sailing education on Ishigaki Island. Club members were a little envious that Taiwan has a public school with a sailing class, leading city officials to propose a student exchange program! Following last year’s voyage around Taiwan, Yue Ming received an invitation from the French Office in Taipei to teach French students in Taiwan to sail. This May, Yue Ming will take some of these French children to sea, sailing from Tamsui to Kaohsiung by way of Hsinchu, Taichung, Penghu, and Tainan. On arrival, they will take part in the Kaohsiung French Festival. Sailing has become a bridge between Yue Ming and the world, realizing Huang’s ambition of “crossing the sea to make friends abroad and treating the whole world as a classroom in order to change lives.”

Yue Ming’s young sailors made international friends when they visited Japan’s Ishigaki Island for an exchange with a local youth sailing club.

Serina Tsubakihara, the owner of a camera found by Yue Ming students, visited Taiwan for the children’s graduation ceremony.

The remarkable journey of a camera found during a beach cleanup has deepened the friendship between Taiwan and Japan.