Educational Activities

Journal Entry
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August 23, 2003
Saturday

There are no days off at sea. Something about the ship needs steering, the people need feeding, you know, minor stuff. Actually, that food thing is not so minor. Okay, neither is the ship thing. The truth is, these ships are too expensive to be taking it easy for two days a week. .

On a brighter note, everyone seems to have gotten over being sea sick. You don’t die from it, but you don’t do much dancing either. For about a day, I felt fairly rotten, and “got sick” once. In a just world, this would make a person feel better. Oh well. I used transcutanious patches, similar to the nicotine patches used to stop smoking, only mine have scopolamine, not nicotine. Scop patches are worn stuck to your skin, and the drug is absorbed through the skin. In any case, everyone is feeling much better now.

On board ship, many things have to be done each day for things to run smoothly, and we all have to be part of the process. The ship’s crew takes care of the day to day activities, while the science crew deals with the gathering of information. You have probably already seen pictures of the instruments used to probe the ocean depths. What you may not know, is that bringing samples up from the ocean is only the beginning. The MOCNESS and the one meter net both trap plankton, but then you have to get it out of the net and into a bottle. Then you have to clean all of the nets, or they start to smell really bad! Even this is just the first part of the investigation. The plankton are prepared in several different ways in order to study them. Some of the studies will not be finished until the scientists have access to equipment back at their home universities.

My jobs so far have been working on tag lines, and taking water samples from the CTD. A tag line is a rope attached to an object that is going to be lowered into the ocean. Most of these objects are very heavy, and could be quite dangerous if they are not under constant control. For example, the zodiac dive boat used when divers go into the ocean has at least five tag lines, including the one on the head-ache ball. There is nothing simple about putting a heavy object into the ocean when the ship is pitching and heaving. Oh, by the way, if you have ever seen a crane with a big steel ball on the end of the cable, that is called a head-ache ball. I think you can figure it out.

Big excitement tonight: some of the crew caught six big Mahi, a really colorful, tasty fish. If you have ever seen video of fish jumping up out of the water, trying to throw the hook, that is exactly what was going on. I guess these waters aren’t as empty as I thought.

Mr. John Praytor

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