Erin C. Myers Madeira

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Erin C. Myers Madeira is a sailor and educator who captained the Makulu II and led a three-year educational voyage around the world. She now works with The Nature Conservancy, helping conservation groups partner with Indigenous Peoples. She has been an editor for Blue Water Sailing, a contributor to Soundings, a U.S. Fulbright Fellow, and a Program Fellow at Resources for the Future.

She studied at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at UC Santa Barbara and at Dartmouth College. Erin learned to sail in a small 12-foot boat in Maine during summers, and she later worked on a commercial schooner, the Rachel B. Jackson, as well as sail-training vessels Westward, Corwith Cramer, and Tole Mour. At Dartmouth, she earned All-American sailing honors for three consecutive years and helped her team win the 2000 ICSA Women’s Dinghy Championship.

In 2001 she joined Reach the World, an educational nonprofit founded by Heather Halstead. As Captain and Expedition Leader, Erin led the Makulu voyage from 2001 to 2004, the organization’s flagship project. The crew studied environmental science, geography, and livelihoods, and produced lesson materials for classrooms in the United States. The voyage started and ended in New York City and followed a westward circumnavigation route, visiting the Caribbean, the Panama Canal, the Galapagos Islands, Polynesia, Australia, Southeast Asia, Sri Lanka, the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, the Mediterranean Sea, Morocco, West Africa, the Cape Verde Islands, and Bermuda.