A variety of things during a day at sea

The motion woke me up this morning around 10 am. We finally have some weather after days of calm seas. First things first, I made a B-line for the coffee machine in the galley. If you’ve never had a cup of coffee on the deck of a ship during a weather system I don’t know what you’re doing with your life. A group of five of us shot the breeze for a while on the fan-tail, discussing the weather, the plan of the day etc… Someone mentioned that hurricane Jose may spin up the coast and meet us on our way back to port.

After coffee, I made my way up to the trailer park on the 02-deck. This is where we measure atmospheric trace gases, complain about poor instrument sensitivity and plot world domination of course. Tom Bell and Mike Lawler are trying to measure amines in our instrument, an exploratory venture on this cruise. Tom and I discuss some recent trends in our data and sends me off to do some processing. This I accomplish with a heavy dose of coffee and Grateful Dead (Europe 72’). Pete Gaube stopped by and mentioned he needed some help deploying his fishing nets (you thought this was a science cruise?). He drops this long skinny net down to some 1000’s of meters and brings up the most ridiculous looking creatures. It’s pretty dam entertaining. On my way to crush some left-over pizza from lunch I ran into Jim who’s an AB on board the Atlantis. Over a game of cribbage, he tells me he’s been sailing for 37 years. Jim’s a cool dude.

Back in the main lab Cyril was staring intently at a circuit board as a variety of bolts rolled around his desk in response to the ship heave. The carcass of what used to be mass flow controller box was on the floor. I remember yesterday I mentioned I wanted to switch a valve remotely using the software on the instrument computer. This was the result of that request. In my mind, it was simple; grab a valve from the spares box and plug that bad boy in…not the case.

Later in the evening some of the grad students broke out guitars, our debut album hits the shelves this November. That’s all for now, I need to work on my dissertation.

Written by Jack Porter

Tags: NAAMES-III 2017