Crew Spotlight: Ryan

We're coming up on two weeks into our voyage, and it has truly been a treat for us so far.  We hope everyone following us has had a great time living vicariously through us.  I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone at home for following us.  Although we can't see it, we really appreciate your support.

Today we are launching a new section of the blog! We're going to take some time over the next few weeks to help you get to know the crew members on this voyage through this approach called Crew Spotlights.  Every so often, we will post about one of our crew, allowing those of you following us to get more familiar with who is taking the Stanford@SEA Class of 2017 on such an amazing adventure! These posts will be in a sort of questionnaire format, preceded by some insight on our shipmate by some of our students.

For our first spotlight, we have our Chief Mate, the one and only Ryan! Ryan has graciously signed up to go first out of the kindness of his heart, and as anyone can see that heart is omnipresent in everything he does.  He's a reliable friend who is a classic explorer, someone who loves to try new things in the pursuit of "new synapses," as he calls it.  Ryan loves the ocean and everything in the water, but his favorite part of voyages is sailing into port, since it allows him to see the fruits of his sailing labors.  He is a man of diverse interests who bases many of his interactions on mutual learning; he says he learns as much or more on these voyages from his students than the students learn from him.  Don't worry, though, because Ryan is a wealth of knowledge who always seems to know the answer to questions.  When he's not sailing, he works on boats or in his family's brewery; it seems his brain is always working to find new beer names and recipes. Ryan tries to live as much as possible in the present, and is currently enthralled with the whales we saw on the side of the boat today.  If he was to jump in a pool of anything, he would jump into a pool of mercury, with proper personal equipment of course, to see how far he'd displace the mercury.  Without further ado, here is Ryan!

-Robby Haag

RYAN

Hometown: Gulf Shores, Alabama

Hobbies: Beer brewing, carpentry, high mountain exploration

Song that is stuck in your head: Blue Sky by the Allman Brothers

Favorite place to travel to: Anywhere new

How long have you been sailing: At least since I could form memories

What draws you to sailing:  The open ocean and arriving into ports by sea

Worst job on the ship: No such thing; ship's needs are ship's needs

What are you looking forward to most on this trip:  Big smiles that fresh fish and clear water bring

Favorite sea creature (or the one you relate with the most):  Octopus

QUOTES ABOUT RYAN

"I am in awe of his general mastery.  He just seems to know what is going on." - a Stanford@SEA professor

"He is not a man of many words, but of infinite knowledge." - a Stanford@SEA student

"When you're sweating the line, and you look up, you can see Ryan on the deck box sweating the line with one hand.  Then you realize, all of the work you've just been doing on those sweats was entirely because of him." - Daela Tipton, Stanford@SEA student [Author's note: Sweating is the action where we pull on the line in a certain manner in order to make it as tight as humanly possible.]

"Like a lot of the crew, he's this jumbled, but wonderful, mess of a teacher and a friend and a mentor and a jokester and a 12-year-old boy excited about laser light shows on the mainsail.  He made our first dawn watch one of the most exciting times I've had on this ship - he's truly a light to have out here in the big blue." - Hanna Payne, Stanford@SEA student