Setting Sail and First Science Sampling

Post written by Charlie:

Greetings blog readers! It was an exciting day today, what with us shipping out into the Bering Sea and all. This morning started out at seven with some breakfast and then a crisp hike up a mountain via an old WWII trail that never seemed to end. [From webmaster: here is a picture of a war memorial in Dutch Harbor with the beach and volcanoes visible in the background]. It stretched up far enough that we eventually encountered snow, and since it was July, we decided to take a picture of ourselves with it. After a couple hours, with us on board, the ship was pushed out of the dock and we moved out into the Sea under our own power, and I was on the second highest deck watching it all. We had some bird and marine mammal spotters out with us as we chugged out of the harbor and they spotted, among other things, Harbor Porpoises, Horned Puffins and Tufted Puffins. It was rather chilly in the afternoon, especially with the wind whipping to and fro but it was exciting just to be able to be part of it all. As we watched the island pull away from us, we turned our eyes seaward only to see past the dark cloud cover to the far out water, bright with sunlight.

When all that excitement wore down, I retreated below decks to the science labs. We still had gear to get ready and giant water bottles to clean, so that's what we worked on for the remainder of the day. Sometime during the afternoon, we reached our first sampling station. We dropped down our CTD, which is a large instrument that measures the depth of the water, the phytoplankton density, the water temperature, etc. This information was relayed to us in the science lab on a monitor and several of us were gathered around it, watching it as it dropped to the sea floor, recording data all the way.

We were also able to participate in a couple of emergency drills, in the case of what else than an emergency. The first was a "man overboard" drill, where the alarm sounded and the voice over the P.A. system told us to go to the scientists lounge for roll call to determine if any of us took a chilly tumble. After roll was called and the crew dragged in the dummy, we were subjected to over an hour of speakers over various topics like ship safety, tech services, galley issues, etc. Afterwards we were able to do an "abandon ship" drill, where we marched out to the helipad/flight deck and assembled into our little life raft groups, so if something absolutely horrific happens to the ship to make us abandon it, we will know what to do. Hopefully nothing like that will happen but it's always nice to know that it can. Anyway, while I wait for the next trawl after dark, which should be around one in the morning, I'm going to get a little rest. I hope you will join me next time and have a great fourth of July.