He could feel the taught fabric swaying under his toes, threatening to knock him off balance. More than 100 feet below, onlookers watched, rapt, as he stopped walking, lifted one foot off of the webbing and held it out to the side, before placing it back on the length of fabric and continuing across the expanse.

Balanced precariously in his orange kayak on the lip of a 70-foot waterfall, Jonathan Blum ’06 was feeling confident. Three of his friends had safely made it down to the pool below. But as he accelerated down the Chilean torrent and landed in the white water, his head and wrist smacked the kayak’s hard plastic deck. When he surfaced, blood was streaming from his nose and his left wrist wasn’t working. Both were broken.

Below deck, the powerful propellors of the 78-foot-long Charles N. Curtis, a former U.S. Coast Guard patrol boat, churned through the Puget Sound. The students were from Tacoma Public Schools’ Science and Math Institute (SAMi), and on that particular day, the Charles served as a classroom for Matt’s marine biology class.