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