A voyage like no other
Youth Sea Adventure
A Legendary Experience
Our youth programs balance challenge, adventure, learning, teamwork, and individual identity formation—exactly what adolescents need.
Trip Length: 5 days, 4 nights (see Sample Itinerary)
Age range: 12+
Crew Size: Up to 15 (including adults)
Adults required: 2 for 12-15 age youth, optional for 16+ age youth.
Cost: $24,000
Available seasonally in Cape Cod and Key West, our youth group expeditions weave character development and leadership training into genuinely unforgettable adventures on the water.
Students don't just sail—they run the ship. They organize and prepare meals, set sails, take the helm, stand watch, and keep the vessel in working order. They also contribute to the real scientific work of our voyages, conducting net tows and participating in data collection for Ocean Pi, our open-source citizen science initiative. Highlights include:
Walk the plank from the bow and land in the waters of a tropical reef.
Pick a star and steer by it with a cup of hot chocolate in one hand and the helm in the other as you sail through the night.
Compete against your shipmates to “set the jib in squal-like conditions” as you get soaked with squirt guns.
Feel a profound sense of community and accomplishment as you go from newbie to setting sails as an effective team.
The program speaks for itself: adults who sailed on our vessels 20-30 years ago are returning now with children of their own, eager to give them the same experience that shaped them.
Hear It From A Student
Listen to Hannah talk about why voyaging changed her life and why, years later, she rushed to help make that experience available to others as a crew member.
Hannah Stowe went voyaging in high school through an Ocean Classroom program offered by her school. Our founder, Thane Robinson, was her history and literature teacher on that voyage. In 2024, when Hannah learned that Thane had acquired Wonder to build an experiential learning school and needed crew, she jumped aboard for our maiden voyage.
Thane was also a student on a semester-at-sea voyage. Having grown up in Montana, the experience was so transformative that, well, here we are with The Voyaging Institute 20 years later.
What We Offer
Exceptional Curriculum
Our youth programs balance challenge, adventure, learning, teamwork, and individual identity formation—exactly what adolescents need. We bring experience teaching and sailing aboard semester-at-sea voyages operated by multiple organizations to the structure of our itineraries. Our voyages include oceanography (net deployments and sampling), a focus on seamanship, sailing at night, and extensive sail handling. Students stand watch and care for the vessel. They begin to live our mantra of “ship, shipmate, self” as members of a small isolated community that must be self-reliant, caring, and diligent.
Best-in-Class Safety
All of our staff receive the same youth training that is mandated by the Scouts. Additionally, Voyaging Institute staff are both mariners and teachers, which is not typical for crew in the Florida Keys. We bring all of the training and safety equipment from our adult programs to our shorter sails. We also outfit our vessels for long distance, multi-week ocean voyages, so our safety gear is redundant and excessive.
While standing watch, every student is equipped with an auto-inflating PFD and a satellite-enabled Personal Locator Beacon.
Character-Defining Experience
Character-defining, coming-of-age, proving yourself, leadership opportunity, see what you’re made of…these are the phrases we use to describe experiences that we all know adolescents need. They need them, but our increasingly digitized society means such experiences are harder and harder to come by. Or their full effect is padded by effort awards. There is no “kid’s version” of the ocean: the expectation of excellence in duty is not lowered because you tried hard. We have found this authenticity of experience to be life changing for youth of all backgrounds.
Purpose-Built Sail Training Vessels
Wonder (formerly named Heritage of Miami) and Jolly II Rover have been hosting 4-5 day Boy Scout voyages since the 1990’s. The bunk plan, inspection regimen, and rigging arrangement are all designed with the idea of learners handling the ropes and making mistakes without worrying about crew safety, vessel safety, or breaking a mahogany yacht finish. They are also not catamarans or fiberglass sailboats converted into charter boats. These vessels are made for adventure and exploration by youth groups.
Skills and Merit Badges
Our voyages create the opportunity for earning several Merit Badges if you are a scouting group or some of your students are scouts. For the badges that can be fully completed during a voyage, many of them include requirements like research, written work, and explanation that we recommend doing after the voyage so that your students can be present in the experience. However, the concepts that are required to be researched, written about, or explained for the badge will be covered during the voyage and the hard-to-attain experiences will be completed underway.
For non-scouting students, we have a “side quest” seamanship skills checklist that they can work through during their time on the ship for an extra challenge. All of this is extra credit, though, as coming aboard and participating in the routine of voyaging will provide enormous skill development opportunity on its own.
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Oceanography
Full completion. All concepts will be explored as part of the voyage. The hardest requirements—conducting a plankton tow (7) and visiting a research vessel (8)—will be done aboard. We do daily net tows and have materials for you to build your own net.
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Astronomy
Full completion. As long as the sky is clear during your voyage, we always have “star night” where we give a tour of the night sky. Additionally, during night watch, we point out numerous constellations, navigation stars, and have a sextant, binoculars, and telescope aboard.
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Weather
Full completion. All concepts will be explored as part of the voyage. The hardest requirements—building a weather instrument and recording data (10) and giving a talk about the weather (11)—can be done underway. We observe and record weather observations hourly.
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Exploration
Full completion. Planning your voyage as an expedition is a project we are happy to help you complete in advance of your voyage. If your navigation plan is solid, we could even utilize it when you come aboard in selecting routes and anchorages.
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Programming
Partial completion. Our open source oceanography project, Ocean Pi, is an excellent candidate for a coding project (5). These projects are run during our voyage as part of watch-standing science duties.
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Orienteering
Partial completion. We use the ship’s compass in all of our navigation and plot our position on paper charts. You can use our voyage to satisfy one of your three required orienteering events.
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Nature
Partial completion. We usually see a wide variety of wildlife on our voyages, allowing you to potentially complete many of your required animal observations
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Bird Study
Partial completion. Birds are a common companion on our voyages. You will likely be able to make significant progress towards cataloging the 20 different species of wild birds you are required to observe.
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Small Boat Sailing
Partial completion. You can complete all of the marlinspike seamanship skills and will take part in many of the sailing maneuvers required in (6). However, our vessels are not capsizable.
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Fishing
Partial completion. We have fishing poles, fishing line, and several kinds of lures. Catching and eating a fish is a common, though not guaranteed, aspect of many of our voyages.
Youth Group FAQ
Are you affiliated with Sea Base or Scouting?
No, we are not affiliated with or endorsed by Sea Base or Scouting America.
Every year, Sea Base contracts with ship owners to provide the vessels and crew to operate their Sea Base High Adventure programs. Our vessels have been hired by Sea Base for over two decades and our crew have sailed on these programs extensively. We have taken what we’ve learned from sailing with hundreds of troops, made changes, and reduced the cost to increase access to the amazing experience of voyaging in the Florida Keys aboard a tall ship.
We are a Boy Scout troop that has done Sea Base—will this voyage feel repetitive?
No, it will feel like the “advanced” version. In fact, students who have done a Sea Base voyage are excellent candidates because they will be able to go deeper into the seamanship concepts.
Our founder has captained multiple Sea Base voyages and the focus of those voyages is usually snorkeling, fishing, and swimming where students are usually just responsible for cooking, cleaning, and maybe a shift at anchor watch. On this voyage, students are broken into watch groups and they are responsible for navigating the ship as soon as we are out of the harbor. Students steer, handle sails, stand watch, navigate, plot the ship’s position, perform boat checks, stand lookout, and more. We anchor the first night to acclimate students to the ship, but after that night we are voyaging. The ocean science element of the trip will also be completely new to any Sea Base alumni.
The only thing that will be the same is (potentially) the ship and (potentially) some of the reefs that we stop to snorkel on if you book a Key West voyage.
Are your itineraries editable or customizable in content or length?
Yes, to a degree. As a youth group, you are reserving the entire vessel, so what we do while you are aboard is very flexible. If you want a longer voyage, we can explore that too. If you have something in mind, we would love to speak with you and brainstorm how to make your dream voyage into a reality. Please email our founder: thane@voyaginginstitute.com.
Do you offer your 2-night voyages for youth groups?
On a case-by-case basis. We know that coordinating the travel of a large group is both expensive and a logistical undertaking. Therefore, we believe our 4-night itinerary is best suited for youth groups. This is the itinerary that Sea Base has been offering for decades. But if you are local to our ships or have another compelling reason why a 2-night voyage is better for your group, we are open minded.
Does our youth group have to be a Boy Scout or Girl Scout troop in order to come on one of these trips?
Absolutely not! Part of our goal in creating these trips is to expand the opportunity to groups outside of scouting. Your youth group can be single-gender or mixed gender, religious or non-affiliated. No matter their background, your students will be forced to learn more about themselves, each other, the ship, and the ocean in this real-world adventure. The ocean is such an extraordinary classroom that we are building an entire school around it.
Are there age or gender restrictions?
We can work with mixed ages, mixed genders, or a more homogenous group of same gender or age. Students must be 12 years old at the moment they step aboard the ship and they must be able to swim even if they don’t plan to go swimming from the ship (we do a swim test on Day 1).
We are a micro-school, homeschool pod, or other alternative education group. Can we integrate a voyage into a course we are teaching?
That sounds like an amazing school—YES! We are all teachers here and would be thrilled to work with your curriculum to be part of a unit you are teaching. Just be prepared for the reality that the cognitive load at baseline for the new material students will be learning to be proficient watch-standers and mariners is already quite large. The best integrations are as capstone experiences to a subject students have already studied (e.g. marine biology, the ocean, weather) where they can see what they just learned in action versus learning new material on top of the ship training.
We would love to have a conversation, please email our founder: thane@voyaginginstitute.com.
If the students are running the ship, what do the adults do?
Adult chaperones are present to help younger students feel secure and more fully immerse in the ship community. For younger students, taking in the new experiences of a ship—weird bathrooms, weird places to sleep, weird schedule—can be easier if a familiar adult is present. But there are no management duties expected of adults. In fact, we put the adults into the watch rotation right alongside the students, so adult chaperones effectively get one of our Voyaging Institute adult program experiences…just alongside a bunch of kids as fellow guest crew. For older students, adult chaperones are not required as maturity levels are higher.
The chaperone rules are not optional, but we can blur the boundary slightly. For example, we know that age does not always correlate perfectly with maturity, so we are willing to work with your group to come up with the right adult composition (i.e. you have one “old soul” 15 year old in your group of 16+).
Ready for Your Adventure?
Please email us to begin the reservation process: thane@voyaginginstitute.com.
We have availability from August-December 2026 and will release availability for January-April 2027 later this year. Based on historic demand and waitlist for the “Sea Exploring” program offered by Sea Base, we expect these slots to fill quickly.