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Location: West End, Tortola
The program is starting! The program is starting! Day 1 is here, and we are (Go)Beyond excited to be welcoming our students aboard. We’ve been hard at work preparing the Dallas Blonde — our wonderful floating home — for our adventure, and we can’t wait to get underway and start our service palooza. In just a few days, we’ll be fully (and safely) immersed in the community: restoring mangrove forests, cleaning beaches, and of course, turtle tagging. All we’ve got left is to welcome the most important members of our crew: the students! Hop aboard and follow along with our expedition updates here.
Meet the team:
Em (Co-Director and Skipper): Emmanuelle is happy to return to GXG for her fourth summer, having previously worked with the company in Ecuador and the BVI. She relishes exploration of the sea through oceanographic research and sailing and sharing that discovery with colleagues and students. When not at sea, Em pursues exciting satellite remote sensing work, revels in wide-open spaces, learns of aviation, and tinkers with old broken things. What keeps Em coming back to these programs are the students who tentatively step out of their comfort zone, only to find their stride and prove their “I can’ts” wrong again and again.
Dara (Co-Director and Mate): Growing up along the Gulf Coast of Florida, Dara has been drawn to the sea from a young age – a love that was fostered through her 2012 BVI adventure with GoBeyond. She graduated from Vanderbilt University with majors in ecology and anthropology, and she’s currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Environmental Science, Studies, and Policy from the University of Oregon. When not underwater, Dara enjoys hiking, concert-going, and enthusiastic conversations about environmental justice. She hopes to pursue a career in international ocean advocacy, and she can’t wait for this session!
Anna (Mate): Anna loves deep, meaningful conversations, good food, reading, writing, and seeing people make the most of opportunities around them. This is why, after ten years of teaching high school, she decided to do something different with her life and is now on the way to making sail training her profession. Growing up in landlocked Switzerland, she only started sailing four years ago, first on a marine biology research vessel in Scotland, then with a Youth Charity. In that capacity, she halfway circumnavigated Britain and crossed the Atlantic twice before Covid put an end to that. Since then, she’s been working at Contact Tracing, waiting for the world to open up again.