Bermuda Winter

Apparently Bermuda's winter starts...now. It's dropped about 10 degrees over the few days, prior to being absolutely perfect out mid-week. It's about high 50's during the day and drops to low 50's nighttime. Not too bad, but you definitely notice the change. As long as I'm able to wear shorts for work, I'm pleased.

However, the wind has picked up, pretty strong. Not great news, considering we have our February BATS cruise on Tuesday. We missed out on January's BATS cruise due to excessive repairs of the Atlantic Explorers tanks. I didn't realize that the ship is actually about 25 or some years old.

Typically, BATS does two cruises a month. A BATS core cruise covers all the essential nutrient sampling, which are 5 days long. Bloom cruises are about 3 days long and focuses on primary production. All of the samples I analyze are gotten during the BATS core cruises.

I'm not quite sure the status of going out with the BATS cruise each month, but in preparation for Bering Sea, I'm getting as much time on the sea as I can. And when I think of it, I have jack-shit for sea time, all I've gotten is 5 days after a few weeks in Bermuda. So, I still don't have complete efficiency with Sea Methods, but they aren't hard. With getting a firm grasp on any protocol, all it takes is repetition and your own trouble shooting, before you have a comfortable feel for whatever you're doing whether it be sampling, analysis, or lab prep work.

So, again, I'm quite excited to be going out to sea and crossing my fingers for good weather. One of the things I've gotta do before cruise is prep work, that is getting sample bottles together, cleaning, labeling crap. All really exciting stuff, but so necessary to be organized at sea.

I don't have too much more information about the Bering Sea cruise right now. I've only had a brief chat with the boss about the trip. For now, I know we will leave March 27-28th for Seattle.
From there we fly up to Dutch Harbor, Alaska. I'm not sure whether we will be loading the Healy in Seattle or in Dutch. I've heard that in Dutch Harbor, the ratio of men to female is 0 females to every 1 man. I'm excited to grow a pretty bad ass beard. And even more excited to shave it into a mustache after I return.

The actual cruise will be from April 3 to May 12. My duties will mostly be to do pigment sampling, like chlorophyll(MORE LIKE BOROPHYL), sorry. I'm assuming I'll do some other stuff, but that's all I know. I'll get to play on the ice, which will be cool. Maybe go Seal hunting on Polar Bear's back. Palin says they're not endangered so I'm sure I'll have a chance to AT LEAST ride one.

That's the news for the cruise.
Hope ya'll ain't got the blues.
Cuz it's cold and stormy with a chance of the flu.

Interscope just signed me. Above is a little of my handy work with the english language.


So besides, getting cold as hell here in Bermuda, I just got my license. It kind of looks like the McLovin' ID from Haiwai. It features my huge mop of hair that I recently cut off. I hadn't cut it since I orginally got here, so 4 months or so. I had the goal to grow it out and be all long haired like, but I realized the only thing that would happen with growing out my hair is looking more and more like Toadstool from the Mario Kingdom.

Before getting my license I had to take a riding portion test. This included riding around in a circle, stopping before a line, and weaving through cones. To complete it all I had to do was pay 135 dollars. 135 to ride basically a toy bike, that maxs out at 35 mph. Originally, I felt 35mph on a bike was fast, but after getting comfortable on a bike I'd really like to speed it up a little.

I need to get a pic of the bike up here. I'm quite confident it might be the best deal in the history of shitty bikes in Bermuda.

In other news, the Argentina Women's Field Hockey team is staying at BIOS for the next two weeks. That has, by no surprise, excited many of us here.


Hope everyone is doing well and getting through the winter depression. Save up some money to come visit Bermuda.


Cheers,

DB