A boatload of adventurous Swedish teens docked in the Inner Harbor on Monday morning.

Baltimore is just one more port of call in an ambitious school program taking the 16- to 19-year-olds around the globe to teach them about secondary school subjects by way of hands-on experience.

Their ship, the T/S Gunilla, carries about 50 crew members, all but about 10 of them students.

“This is a social studies program they attend,” said the captain of the ship, Fredrik Sunberg. “And by using the ship, they learn to take care of their fellows and learn teamwork.”

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The 200-foot, 405-ton ship is the largest sailing ship in Sweden and has its home port in Ockero, a group of islands off the west coast of the country.

The ship acts as the main tool the students use to travel and acquire learning experience in subjects ranging from biology to the social and political ideologies of different countries.

“We have a lot of responsibility,” said Jonna Kral, 18. “We go by ourselves sometimes, without teachers, and that’s kind of hard sometimes, but it’s a good way to learn.”

The students last stopped in Charleston, S.C., and plan to stay in Baltimore for a week. They plan to take one-day excursions to Washington and to Wilmington, Del., where they will continue to study and work on projects that compare what they observed in geographical regions ranging from Cuba to Belize to Cape Verde.

“It’s to get out in the world and experience what we read about at home,” said Johan Andreasson, 19.

The program allows the students to have three 90-day sailing trips over the course of three years. For the students, the school — called “Sailing College” — is equivalent to a secondary education. The next possible step for them would be to attend university.

The students are halfway through the last of the three trips, which means they will finish their sailing around the world within the next 45 days.

But for the next week, they look forward to learning from their temporary home in the Inner Harbor.

“I have great expectations for Baltimore,” Andreasson said.

bmann@baltimoreexaminer.com