BEST Entry #7

What's up yo?

Sooooo sorry for not having any pictures of me yet on that website. I see that you all still read on a 4th grade level...strictly pictures and no text. Good news in the photo department, I've been told by the writer that tomorrow(Thursday) is Doug and Mike day. I informed her that it should be strictly, Doug Day, and that we should celebrate it like Black History Month. Which, I know, turns the whole day into month long celebration. Just makes for more Pinatas.

The reason for the Primary Production day is because, well it was basically the last thing on their list. Check out the WHOI website for updates.

Also, great news. I did not spend my whole day filtering. We were able to deploy Sediment traps. This allows for me to go out and work on the aft deck and wear a hard hat. And instead of a work vest, we gotta wear these huge orange jumpsuits called Mustang Suits. Tomorrow, we'll recover them. The owner of the traps, Pat, has told me that the small boat must be used for retrieval. He doesn't want to do this, so I was more than happy to hop in the a little boat and spin around. Again, increases chance of Doug exposure on the website. And don't worry, I won't be alone and driving it. Because if THAT happened, I'd depart to find a seal, capture one, then try to find a polar bear for a "feeding" experiment. Those guys are so friggin hungry.

I think I recently broke a record for longest consecutive streak of breakfasts eaten before 8am. Going on 21. Nobody's done that before. Ever. If anyone is interested, I'll sign a photograph of a muffin and fax it to you.

So starting with B-fast, generally this is how my day goes.

730 - Talk about Breakfast streak, WHILE, eating breakfast.
800 - Wander down to main lab. Stand around.
830 - Suduko.
900 - Sample CTD.
1000 - Filter water, alone, in a room with red light, to the background of ACDC mixed in with your greatest hits from the 80's.
1130 - Eat lunch. With a motherfucking salad.
1200 - Return to lab to figure out how bored I am.
1203 - Sudoku
1240 - Nap/TV or sample another CTD.
100-400 - Wander semi-aimlessly between research papers. I'm getting smart. Watch out. Or watch the absurd amount of playoff sports there are on tv. Love it, especially like watching them during the day. Did anyone notice KG's impression of a retard after Ray Allen hit that shot. Jesus.
500 - Dinner. With guess what....another friggin Salad.
600 - Back to lab, probably filter or perhaps reading Chlorophyll samples.
800 - Emails and whatnot. TV.
900 - Work out. You know when you take out the trash and you throw a full hefty bag into the can, and it doesn't quite fit and kind of spills out over the edge. Well that's basically what my stomach looks like going into my torso. Thank god they have a treadmill.
1000 - Sometimes CTD, or read papers on phosphorus.
1200 - Bed. Not ONCE have my sheets stayed on the bed. The stretchy thing on all bedsheets is one of the most underrated things in my life.

All for now.

Doug

BEST Entry #6

Date: Monday, April 20th.
Local time: 0012

So, here's actually a live blog post. I had written those other posts previously, obviously. I had wanted to post them all with pictures, but whatever, you'll have to just read the boring text.

Just a word of advice, start from the first entry and work your way to this one. This one won't be much of a post anyway.

We're about 2.5 weeks into it, 17 days, with 21 more to go. Like I said before, the days have gotten repetitive. I had no idea it was Saturday a few days ago, until the NBA games were on around noon, our time.

I don't often re-read my posts, but I did this time. I am disappointed with the quality of them. You deserve better, I will be better. Just not this one. I am tired.

So, again I apologize no pictures. Check out this website... www.polardiscovery.whoi.edu. Go to live from the poles, Expedition 5, Today on the Ice. Great pictures. I managed to convince the photographer to take a few seducing shots of me on the ice, with the Healy in the background. It's definitely Calender worthy.

Also, at some point, the writer and photographer will cover my work a little. How bout that?

Anyway, expect more frequent posts, that contain way funnier, edgier material.

-DFace

BEST Entry #5

BEST Entry #5(Day 14)
Date: Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Location: Heading East about 61N. Again crushing slowly throught ice…~6 knots.
Local Time: 11:15pm

Been about a week or so since I updated, pretty typical of the standard blog. I guess I didn’t have anything particular to discuss over the early part of the past week. Now, there is really no concept about weeks, weekends, and weekdays. Just one day after another, one station after the other.

We’ve basically finalized our sampling plan. So we do Process stations every other day, these include incubations, filtering for pigment, filtering for chlorophyll, and taking samples for use with microscopy(4-5hrs of work). About every other STATION, which we may do 2-3 per day, sometimes more, we filter for chlorophyll and take samples for cellular analysis.

I know, doesn’t seem a lot to a work day and its not. I’ve found other fun things to do like, sleep and eat. Also, I’ve been reading exciting ocean biogeochemical dynamics.

Oh, I actually read a non-textbook for the first time since who knows. The Watchmen. Movie previews looked great, I’ll never really have a chance to see it Bermuda, and its one of Times 100 greatest novels, so it was one of the books I actually somewhat sought to read and lucky enough it was found on the boat. From all the reviews of the book, I thought it was going to be spectacular. It wasn’t. There’s something about reading a book and conjuring your own dynamic images in your head, but you when you read something in comic form, where images are stationary. I found it difficult to relate the static pictures into exciting action sequences. Story line is definitely good and a lot of good characters, I just figure the movie might be a better experience than the book. I hope I’ve successfully discouraged anybody from reading it. And if you hear anybody saying, “oh the book is so much better”, without reading it, you will know its not. Because of me.

The past three days have been irregular from the first week and a half.

For one, Sunday was Easter. Some of us had a discussion of how the date of Easter Sunday is determined, none of us knew. In light of Easter lore, how much do you think Jesus could bench press? Pre-resurrection and post? I bet one of those dudes from ESPNs World Strongest Man could probably move a boulder similar to Jesus’s rock.

Here’s something funny, Excel Word gives Jesus’s, with an apostrophe as a typo. This can either mean two things. One, Jesus is/was poor as shit and does not own anything, so there can be no possessive form of Jesus. Or two, Jesus needs a post apostrophe like Jesus’ (not typoed) and is non-singular. So Jesus’ must also include LeBron James.

Back to Easter on the Healy. They cooked two pigs. We ate them in the helicopter hangar. Without the helicopter, unfortunately. It was alright, nothing special.

Today, on the other hand, was quite exciting. I was able to go on the ice. We’ve starting to head back East. AFTER, crossing into Russian waters for a little bit, how fucking awesome is that. I’m SURE the Russians were very closing to launching torpedos.

So, we’ve been crunching through ice, which makes for good, solid ice stations for science. To go on the ice, you must attend an on-ice briefing in the morning, which is usually during my filtration times. I managed to make this briefing and planned to go out later(1600) to help bring up sediment traps for ice holes, cored out in the morning.

However, around 1400, over the intercom, we heard that there was ice recreation time. So much of the scientists and CG attended a briefing and then went out to “play” on the ice. It was maybe 1 football field coned off, with protection from a Coastie armed with a shotgun for defense against Polar Bears. Any biologist knows that Polar Bears are impervious to shotgun blasts and will actually make the bear, angrier, and larger. Unfortunately, none approached.

Ice-rec time was grown up recess. Lots of pictures were taken and a game of kickball started. I’m a big fan of kickball. Mostly any sport involving an inflated rubber ball. Four-square, dodgeball, kickball. All sports very under-rated. But, pretty cool to play a game of kickball in the Artic on seasonal ice-patches.

That’s about it for this entry.

BEST Entry #4

BEST Entry #4(Day 6)

Date: Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Location: Long: 171 35.124 W Lat: 59 54.378 N. Map it.
Local Time: 10:38pm

Looking out of the porthole to see the sun is finally starting to set down. It’s a little hard to tell sometimes because of the high reflectance of the white snow.

Nothing too exciting has occurred since the Walri siting. 600 were counted. Pretty unusual, the observers emailed to a few walrus experts and they were pretty geeked. Nerds.

The morning after the walri, I saw a spotted seal and her pup. Hilariously, the mother started to “run” away leaving her pup behind. They were only 50 yards away, so you could make out facial expressions as we steamed by. The mother looked completely distraught, as she ought to be, seeing a massive red machine slowly moving towards her. All she could do was kind of slowly flop away; pretty hard to move on the snow with that fat ass of hers. What was interesting to me was that the seal made the decision to make a run for it, leaving her pup to the massive red object. Better one than both, I guess is the proper survival thinking. I apologize, I didn’t have the camera at the time.

On the science side of things, everybody has been having difficulty with their incubators. There are about 6 incubation tanks outside on the bow. “Science Sea Water” that is taken from some place in the Aft and brought all the way up to the bow feeds these tanks. The problem with this was that we were creating slush as the ship moved along which led into the pump manifolds, into the tubing, into the tanks. So, instead of the tanks actually freezing up, we were sucking in ice to begin with. After a meeting with a few marine techs and CG engineers, the incubators decided with an option to use ballast water. A little warmer than liked, but was the best option.

To walk you through the idea of our incubator, here’s what it is.

1.Big tank. Maybe 3 by 3ft and 2ft tall.
2.Tank filled with ambient seawater. Flows through and empties through tubing on opposite side.
3.Into the tank are placed 500ml bottles. Bottles are filled with water from a specific depth.
4.Before placed in tank, bottles have a radioactive isotope added which tags to a certain compound.
5.Bottles are placed in bags to simulate the percent light. More mesh bags, means less light, lower depth.
6.Bottles sit in there for 24hrs.

That’s pretty much it. Sorry to bother you with all this science talk. That’s pretty much all I get around here. Lots of science, definitely too much. There are a couple of guys that follow baseball, so that’s all the non-science talk I really get on a regular basis.

I guess maybe I should talk about the boat a little bit. How about food? The messdeck. The food is not that great, luckily there’s such a wide variety that you can always be satisfied. They’ve got basically every god damn liquid you could possibly want. Like 15 kinds of soda, two ice-slushy things, three kinds of coffee, shitty milk, hot off the spout hot chocolate, about 8 juices, and water. Can’t really think of anything they’re missing. Except…hmm, maybe BOOZE. Just kidding, I can handle it.

Away from the drinks, they’ve got a pretty good array of fruit and a salad bar. The hot food is usually a combination of dry (meat/chicken/fish), potatoes(heavily greased and peppered), and two to three things I can’t look at without getting upset. Not just physically upset, but angry that someone is that terrible at making food or just the fact that they thought it’d be a good thing to eat.

To be honest, I don’t mind the food at all. It’s free and I can eat healthy and it’s varied enough to not piss me off. But this is me saying this 6 days in out of 40.

Another thing that the messdeck has is a desert table. Usually 3 desert options for lunch and dinner. Usually different. I really don’t understand desert. Growing up it was always such a special treat, but now it’s just….do you really need a piece of chocolate cake every fucking time after dinner? I see it with mostly everyone, a few cookies with either a slice of pie and cake. I’m not saying I’m innocent, I will have my cake and eat it too…but maybe that’s once or twice a week. I don’t know, that wasn’t a very good rant. I’d give a C-.

Bossman and I have slowly gotten into a routine of things. Tomorrow, we have a bunch of CTDs that we’ll take just a few samples from, nothing special. It will be a day off from Production casts.

We’re making our way west now, crunching through ice. Air temp the first few days was pretty nice, right around freezing. Today it dropped 10 below and winds probably put it around -30. My fingers almost fell off sampling the CTD.

Peace.
DB

BEST Entry #3

BEST Entry #3(Day 6)

Date: Sunday, April 5th, 2009
Location: Steaming to Station 3, crunching through ice.
Time: 2315


Change of pace is the name of the game. First of all, I eat breakfast. I rarely do this. Common knowledge states that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. I’d like to switch important with inconvenient. However, my schedule has quite changed a bit. This morning, we had our first process station. Process station consists of many CTDs and ice core sampling. Our CTD(for Primary Production) went in around 8:00am. With a long morning of work, a easy-access, already made, buffet style breakfast is something I won’t pass up. So far, 4 consecutive mornings of food, if you consider a dry bagel and water from Airport vendor, twice.

A lot of our gear is in two radvans(vans that are used for stable and radioactive isotopes. Without heaters, they’re frigid. Luckily, there are heaters. The whole sampling process, with filtering took until 1:00pm. The main lab, mostly holds everybody. There are three main benches and because we were late getting set up, we got shafted and got a bench side with lots of traffic. I haven’t decided when I’m gonna start asking anyone who passes by if they’ve touched my ass. Judging from the scientific community here, they’ve won’t think it’s remotely funny.

The rest of the day, we watched our incubation chambers to make sure none of our lines were getting frozen over, which they did. I want to post a picture of Mike, my boss, working on them while I sit up in the bridge watching for birds, but internet is too slow to post.

However, there’s a reason for being up on the bridge. I was speaking with one of the bird surveyors and she invited me up to see what they were doing after dinner. Cruised on up and there was nothing but white sheets of ice and steadily shifting crack in the ice from the steadily moving Healy. There are two bird watchers that also note marine mammal sitings. We briefly talked about how they never see anything and all of a sudden we get a siting of Walruses or as I like to call them, Walri.

We first saw this group of 15/20. Then after a little while later, we started to see MASSIVE groups of these guys. Not often or ever, were that many Walri seen. Announcement went out over the loud speaker(called the Pipes) about the colony. Maybe around 200/300.

Again, wish I could post a picture.

Well, now back out to check on the incubator.

BEST Entry #2

BEST Entry #2(Day 5)

Date: Saturday, April 4, 2009
Location: On a boat between lots of ice. Actually in bed.
Time: 2315


Last time I left you all, I was moments away from falling asleep in a cozy bench across from the ticket counter of PenAir(Alaska Airlines). So yes, I managed to sleep there, wake up, and switch my flight to a 0700 departure. After three days of traveling and 14 hours in a plane the day before, let’s just say I almost broke my two fingers from crossing them.

I was definitely nervous right before the plane took off, very windy, dark lots of snow. I thought there was maybe 50:50 chance of making it. After 30 minutes or so in the air, everything cleared up and a gorgeous view of the ice came into view. It was quite interesting to see ice, ice, ice, less ice, less ice, even less ice, and then none. Then came clues of the Aleutian Islands. Little frozen rocks, thrown into the sea. Descent on a prop plane in the middle of the Bering Sea actually makes it seem like you’re flying. You know, typically on a big 757 it’s just straight up and down. With the small prop, and a sharp entrance to Dutch Harbor’s airport, you definitely felt like you might want to grab the “oh shit handle” as we swerved our way onto the runway.

So hell yeah, I made it to frigging Dutch Harbor. But…I completely lost contact with Mike and anyone from the Healy, so how the hell am I going to get to this ship. I could see it when we we’re landing, so I figured I could walk. However, then I saw a sign for a taxi…and NEXT to the taxi sign was a guy, wearing a Healy shirt. He was a crew member(CoastGuard aka Coastie) and offered me a ride to the ship.

Sorry, no shot of the ship straight docked. I didn’t want to seem like a queer, taking a shot of the boat around a bunch of Coast Guard guys as soon as I stepped out of the van.

Got onboard, found Mike. He was very relieved to see me. I was the last one on board, and very close to being a huge asshole and making the boat wait for me. And you know how I said we’d depart on the 4th? Well, that wasn’t the case, we left the harbor at 2000.

Saw a few Bald Eagles. Unfortunately, I didn’t see them mauling any fish, just them contemplating to do it.

After departure, we had a meeting to deal with Ship operations. Basically, the science party was introduced to the Coastguard Crew and we were told how shit goes on around here. After, we spent a little time getting our lab space set up and getting things to go for the next day(Today).

This morning, after sleeping like a baby on pain medication, I woke up for an early breakfast @ 0700. Spoke with the Production/Export team(Mike, Myself, Pat Kelly(Rhode Island)) to discuss setting up our incubations.

Our incubation tank is used to determine the major analysis of Primary Proudction, C14 uptake. I’m not familiar with the protocol of it, so all I really know so far is. We take samples from a particular depth, hit them with a radio-isotope(C14). Place them in a clear tank. Feed ambient seawater through it(keeping similar temps). Then the out flow seawater runs out the bow.

After the set-up we had our first Science meeting. Here we went over transect logistics, when we were arriving to our first station, our route, who’s sampling on the first station, safety, and general bullshit. There’s about 40-50 of us. I’ll go into more about science party, rooms, food, free time, the boat, later. Right now there’s just a lot to talk about. I doubt I’ll be saying that 4 weeks from now.

Shortly after the meeting, we started hitting ice. You can feel a rumble, sometimes intense, sometimes feels like a dryer ending its cycle. Not that I’ve been inside a dryer or anything. It is loud though and I’ve been told it gets much LOUDER.

The rest of the day, I walked through protocol and locations for everything I need for sampling, since I missed out on the set-up. Early evening, we had our first CTD cast and we took some samples, just to make sure I was good to go on everything tomorrow morning.

Tomorrow morning(Sunday) we have our first process station. So, I must get my rest. It’s odd going to be earlier than midnight.

BEST: Entry 1 (Day 3)

Entry #1
April 2nd, 2009

Location: The Air(Ishek National Park? to Anchorage)
Time: 2200hrs

Luckily, my buzzed head doesn't provide too many hairs to pull out. It's a close to decision, but I've decided to spare you all of an expletive themed rant aimed at that asshole, Mt. Redoubt.

Asshole.

So, you're probably wondering what the hell is Imshek National Park? And I'm gonna be honest, I have no clue either. I don't even think I spelled it properly. But, I can tell you how I got there.

Original flight details put us arriving into Anchorage on Tuesday @ midnight. Instead, the flight was canceled, I believe due to a combination of low visibility due to Redoubt and the darkness. This left Mike and I a night in Salt Lake City and a plan to board a flight to Anchorage via Minneapolis on Wednesday morning. However, that didn't happen and the next confirmed departure was the following Thursday morning, SLC->Minn-->ANC. We were also put on stand-by for an 2055 direct flight SLC to ANC on wednesday night. Good news was that there was room on that stand-by...for one of us. Mike was able to make it out of SLC on Wed. and I stayed behind for the 700am(Thur) flight to ANC via Minneapolis.

So, Wednesday, the SLC Airport made me reluctantly give up my "sleeping on an Airport bench virginity". To be honest, I slept halfway decent.

Thursday morning showed great promise, everything seamed to be on time and I was getting the hell out of SLC. I made it into Minneapolis fine. I saw a Monk at the airport with Ipod. I really want to ask him what he's got on it. It also led me to wonder, "How many volumes of Pure Moods" were made?

I made it into Anchorage fine. Long flight, 5hrs. I watched the new Guy Ritchie(Snatch, Lock Stock and 2 smoking barrels) movie, RockNRolla. Not bad. A lot better than The Day The Earth Stood Still, which Delta showed us flying to SLC. Whoever decided to remake that movie should probably find another career.

So, FINALLY, I arrived in Anchorage. Because getting there kep getting switched around, my flight to Dutch had to be changed. Unfortunately, I couldn't change this myself because of not possessing a certain credit card. Mike had to do this when he arrived in Anchorage. So I was praying to have a flight ready for me when I landed. I did, everything was set to go.

Departure time was 1645. 3 hrs flight. Slept most of the way there, which left me as a very confused passenger when we landed. When I woke up it was 2115. Little over due. So, ok, what the hell. Stewardess told us to leave our bags on the plane and stretch out. Again, confused. I got out, walked inside the smallest terminal I've ever seen. The Wright brothers probably had one 10 times larger. I then, realized that we never made it to Dutch, hence the extremely foggy skies. To add to my confusion, my phone had no service, probably due to the verizon guy and pack of wolves is a prety shitty wireless support team.

So now, I here I am flying back to Anchorage. Fortunately, I'll have a whole day(the 3rd) to make it into Dutch.

Looks like Anchorage Airport and I will be having a one-night stand.