“Sharks are very curious,” Brenda Ramer says. “If you stand really still you can feel them pulling on your fins.” For a daughter of the Midwest and a teacher trained in special education, Ramer seems remarkably drawn to life under the sea. In fact, her enthusiasm for oceanic adventure led her to develop Team ECCO, a Hendersonville nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching children to love and respect the ocean and the life in it.

It all started about ten years ago when she and her family took a trip to the Florida Keys and snorkeled on a reef. “I’d never seen anything like that before in my life,” says the 49-year-old Ohio native. She went back the next year and got certified for scuba diving. Since then, she’s done dozens of dives. (She quit counting after 100.)

During her scuba training, she thought it would be interesting to somehow involve children in dives. She had come across a program in the Keys that trained teachers for a week at a dolphin research center so that they could help their students learn about marine animals. Then it occurred to her. “I had to find a way to take children to science rather than put a science book in front of a child.”

In 2001, she approached Charles Snead, then the principal at Hendersonville Elementary, and told him about her plan: essentially, taking kids down to Florida to swim with the manatees. It would seem natural for school administrators and parents to be reluctant to send their children out to sea with a woman who admits she likes sharks. But apparently, Ramer, a public school teacher for some 15 years, inspires confidence. “Charlie said ‘okay,’ and it went from there,” she says. “We did a trip that fall and then a trip the next spring to study sharks at Ripley’s Aquarium in Gatlinburg. The same two trips the next year, and then it just kind of snowballed.” Last year, Team ECCO ran nearly 20 events in which kids ages eight and up either traveled to see sea creatures or listened to Ramer talk and do a demonstration—complete with live turtles, frogs, goldfish and a portable pool. In some cases, the children actually put on masks and “snorkeled” with the critters in the pool. 

Recently, Ramer and her son Michael, a senior at Hendersonville High School, joined forces to feed sharks as part of his senior project. She admits to a few moments of trepidation when her amazingly calm son jumped overboard into shark-infested waters in the Bahamas and started handing out fish parts to six-foot-long sharks. But for the most part, she’s fairly comfortable in the ocean—and everywhere else too. “There’s not a whole lot that scares me,” she says. “I find a lot of things interesting. One of the most thrilling things that ever happened was, at about 131 feet down on a shipwreck, a grouper came out of part of the wreck. Honest to God, I believe it could have swallowed Jonah. And then there’s the barracuda down there, schools of five-foot-long fish with all those big teeth. But they’re not really aggressive, just very curious. They don’t bother me at all any more now. I’ve had them come right up and look into my mask. I think it’s because your mask works almost like a mirror under water. They see their reflection.”

Most of all, she loves what the kids get out of their experiences. She believes immersion is the best teacher and that her kids retain more because it’s more exciting—about the history of the animals, how many there are and where they are on the planet. “Not everybody learns the same way,” she says. “They’re going to respect what’s out there and get a grasp of it because they’ve been there and they’ve seen it.”  —John Clausen

Swim with the Fishes Team ECCO’s new Ed-venture Center on Main Street in Downtown Hendersonville lets teachers, parents and others see what Team ECCO is all about. Stop by 318 North Main Street or go to www.team-ecco.com.