The Grady-White Boats challenge grant was met with generous support from Carolina Coastal Classrooms' Board of Directors, First Citizens Bank, Tidewater Atlantic Research, Southern Bank Foundation, the Mildred H. McEvoy Foundation, the Ella Ann L. and Frank B. Holding Foundation, the Robert P. Holding Foundation, the Felix Harvey Foundation, RBC Centura Bank, and many other people who support Carolina Coastal Classrooms.

The Grady-White Boats gift was used, along with $31,000 raised by the Carolina Coastal Classrooms to match the challenge, in restoring the last remaining North Carolina-built skipjack. ADA MAE will serve as Carolina Coastal Classrooms' first educational vessel.

Restoration work on ADA MAE was done at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort, NC. Museum volunteers, supervised by the Museum's shipwright, provided their valuable shipbuilding experience to the project.

ADA MAE was built in 1915 in Rose Bay, NC by Captain Ralph Hodges and was originally one of over 1,000 skipjacks from an oyster-dredging sailing fleet on the Chesapeake Bay, the Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds. Today there are only a few of these distinctive vessels remaining. ADA MAE is the only one of the skipjacks left that was built in North Carolina and is the last remaining example of a commercial working sail vessel built and used in our state.

ADA MAE was discovered in Baltimore, MD and brought back to her homeport of Washington, NC in 1995 by Dr. Gordon Watts of the Institute for International Maritime Research. He and his crew rescued the boat and began her restoration for use as an educational vessel.

ADA MAE will provide students with hands-on educational programs using practical applications of math, science, ecology, social studies, reading, writing, and computer science skills learned in the classrooms. Carolina Coastal Classrooms programs will be offered on a daily basis during the academic year, and for more extended periods in the summer.

Trained shipboard educators will lead educational activities on board ADA MAE. Programs and activities will be designed to supplement North Carolina's public school Standard Course of Study goals and achievement expectations for certain core curricula. Carolina Coastal Classrooms programs are modeled after Maryland's Living Classrooms Foundation and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. Together these programs have over 50 years of proven success in providing exciting and meaningful shipboard experiential education programs in science, math , social studies and maritime heritage to students and teachers.