Walking Through Jello

Post written by Charlie:

We had some inclement weather today, resulting in rougher seas than we've been having for the past few days. The ship has been rolling more that I'm accustomed to, which isn't much, but it's still a lot all the same. Walking has been made difficult since I can walk across the room and it feels like I'm walking up an incline but then the ship rolls and I speed up, since I'm trying to walk up a hill, and must arrest my momentum lest I run headlong into a station or somebody else. Not a good thing. I even described it to a few other people in such a way that they found it pretty funny. To me, it felt like walking through Jello; sometimes it wiggles with you, sometimes it wiggles against you.

This afternoon one of our pieces of equipment was lost overboard when the cable attached to it broke while it was being towed behind the ship. It was a piece of optics equipment used by a group of scientists who were studying phytoplankton. Apparently it helped in some way to detect levels of chlorophyll in the water. From what I've heard, it was a $200,000 piece of machinery and while we went in circles trying to fish it out, we were not able to recover it. We did plot its location with coordinates so hopefully we'll stop by later to try to get it again or we'll let someone know it's out there and let them come find it. It caused quite a stir around here, while we went 'round and 'round trying to snag it with our grappling hooks. They have monitors down in the lab to plot the ship's course and it was really funny to look at it when they were through trying to find it. It was just a bunch of red loops around one point marked "Optics" and was kind of neat to think that the ship could maneuver around a spot that's so tiny like that.

For all you people our there who really like maps and would like to look up where we currently are, we're about 30 or so nautical miles dead west of Nunivak island. If you need help finding it, just go to some image search engine and pin it down. Now that you know where the island is, you can roughly find out where we are.

There have been sightings of blue whales and fin whales along with sea lions swimming off from the boat. We were even lucky enough to snap a picture of the sea lion and you can even see his whiskers. There really hasn't been much action tonight, since we were doing several moorings and weren't able to do much stuff with krill. We should get some activity in here tomorrow. I sure hope so, since I've already taken a nap in the lab only to become camera fodder. Falling asleep in the lab is something of a common occurance and when it happens, everyone else is ready to snap a picture of you with your head cocked to the side and your mouth wide open. Anyway, like I said, not much traffic through our sector so what little work was required tonight has already been done. All I need to do in the meantime is wait for tomorrow night and I think I'll do that by sleeping. Have a good day,night, morning, afternoon or evening, depending on when you're reading this. Keep in touch and you'll hear some interesting stuff, I'm sure.