The Ocean Classroom Foundation offers a unique sailing program called the Maritime Challenge Camp. The Maritime Challenge Camp gives young cancer survivors the opportunity to immerse themselves in a challenging and focused sailing environment. These young community members are struggling with profound personal and social issues. With the camp they realize their potential as contributing and productive adults.

Fifteen previous cancer surviving sailors will be partnered with Barefoot Workshops. Barefootworkshops will offer a one-week Digital Video Workshop August 1st -8th, 2006 aboard the schooner Harvey Gamage departing from Rockland, Maine and sailing to Boston, MA. Using eight Canon-sponsored, state-of-the-art GL2 cameras and eight Apple sponsored laptops; the sailors will confront themselves and the world of their illness and recovery. While learning basic camera skills, the sailors will navigate the schooner to nearby ports, exploring surrounding island communities. The demands and discipline of filmmaking have unusual advantages over traditional methods of coping with disease. At the end of the week, the sailing filmmakers will have found a new and highly personal voice to express the experience of cancer. In reducing cancer to a film project, they can explore it, cut it, and deal with it in a highly empowering way that may once have seemed impossible.

At the end of the one-week program, the sailors will walk away with the technical know-how, confidence and ability to tell a story. The objective is for them to share a new appreciation and way of looking at the world around them. Ocean Classroom is planning to have the edited version by November 2006 and incorporate these short films into educational television programming for channels such as The Discovery Channel.