Day three at sea!

The ocean has decided to get livelier as we get into day three at sea, although I’m told it’s still tame compared to November. Personally, I have become Dramamine dependent and almost always have a mint in my mouth (if you can’t tell, this is my first time on a research cruise). Despite my difficulty with the motion of the ocean, activity has been steadily increasing as we get closer to our first station.

This morning Cyril and Jim had a practice run of sending a radiosonde balloon up to measure barometric data. The crew also laid out the apparatus for the net tow; this is a long, large sock of mesh used to catch fish and we could probably fit half the people on the boat in it if we tried. We also got some training on a microtops machine from James. We get to point a handheld device at the sun and record data. It’s a little like playing a video game; you find the sun spot on something like a level and hold it there (while the ship is moving over the waves) for five seconds. Easy right? These descriptions are pretty basic, but I am a food web person, so anything occurring in air is pretty alien to me.

It also seems that the birds just keep appearing on board. Our little stowaways are going to have a very interesting experience once we get into higher winds if they attempt to fly too far away. We’ve also been seeing plenty of marine mammals, although they’re too elusive for a simple phone camera to catch.

My job on this expedition is pretty simple, I assist everyone with their projects, since I don’t have my own to do (yet). It’s mostly a lot of filtering seawater through different sized filters. I am collecting nutrient samples, which will tell us what the ‘good stuff’ for the microbial food web and I am also responsible for taking ATP and NADH samples, which tells you something about how much energy a cell for growth at the time they were sampled (although I’m sure having all the water around you taken away while you’re stuck on a filter is not a normal part of a phytoplankton’s day-to-day). Other than that, I am at the other scientist’s ‘beck and call’, which is still pretty awesome; I get to see and help with a lot of research vastly different from my own back at Oregon State University.

Living on a ship is a pretty surreal experience. I’m still half convinced that if I just walk around to the other side or go just a bit further, I’ll see land and something familiar. Watching the horizon does help with sea sickness, and it’s kind of fun to see the waves moving that far away. I’m also really confused about how tall people sleep on this boat. I fit in the bunks perfectly, but I am not a large person at all. I’m pretty sure they have to do some contorting, or just hang their legs off the edge to even fit, let alone sleep.

Doing these cruises, you are brought in to this odd little family where everyone wants to make sure you’re doing ok and talk to you and show you everything that’s going on. Everyone on board, science or crew has no problem plopping down next to you at meal times and starting some random conversation that has everyone at the table in stitches at some point. Even though I’m one of the newbies, I’ve been adopted in as though I’ve been here since the beginning, and that makes even the seasickness bearable (14 hours of sleep also helps greatly- at least for now).

Written by Kelsey McBeain

This entry was posted on Friday, May 13th, 2016 at 7:21 pm and is filed under NAAMES (North Atlantic Aerosols and Marine Ecosystems Study). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.