I was lying in bed yesterday morning trying to go to sleep for the longest time but I couldn't, so eventually I got down, took a shower and went to play with the computer. I went to check my e-mail and play a little strategy game I got from Alexei, my MOCNESS boss, but for some reason I ended up with one of my Excel charts open and I was playing with one of the graphs. I then had a revelation of sorts. I knew that I couldn't "break" an axis to relieve overshadowing data points on a bar graph but I found a way to do it without really doing it. I just made the graph look like it had a broken axis instead of actually doing the deed. I was fairly proud of myself. I suppose this rush of happiness and pride didn't help my sleeping situation because I then found that I couldn't go back to sleep. At all. So I stayed up and did some more presentation work. It's almost done now and just needs a few finishing touches and some critics to look it over. Unfortunately there was not a MOCNESS cast today. When I asked Alexei about it he said that he wanted to save a cast for a more favorable depth and probably to save his sample jars for the later half of the 70 meter isobath run back to Dutch Harbor. That's fine with me, it gave me more time to work. The bongo cast was at half after four though so I came down to help out with the filtering which I knew would need to be done, and boy was I right. Of course filtering for water particles isn't that hard and we were done within half an hour. After that I just read a book I found in our library until breakfast. We had breakfast burritos this morning and they were very tasty with a little hot sauce and some salt.

The weather has been very, very favorable for the past 24 hours or so. There was a beautiful sunset last night and I was able to snap several pictures. The water's surface looks so calm and alluring right now. If you weren't guaranteed an immediate case of hypothermia when you hit water and if the boat would stay in place for a couple of hours and if the moon was made of cheese I'd have a good time in the water. So long as I'm wishing, I guess I could go ahead and ask for a magical flying unicorn. You know, at first glance, a magical flying unicorn seems kind of girly but when you really think about it, it begins to sound very appealing, but only if it were war-trained and had an attitude to match. And if it could talk. That'd be really cool and I'm obviously really tired to talk about magical sentient flying unicorns of war in this blog. I think I might stop while I'm ahead and just say good night. Good night.

So I slept a little late again today, but it wasn't quite my fault. You see, I set my pager alarm to wake me up in a rather timely manner in the early afternoon so I went to sleep. I was awoken by the pager beeping next to my head. I picked it up and tried to use the built in light to see the time. The light was much too faint for me to see the time so I turned on my reading light and saw that the pager was beeping because of a low battery alarm. It was also only one o'clock. I put the pager back down and went back to sleep with the expectation of being awoken at the appropriate time. Unfortunately my pager battery passed away later in my sleep and I was rudely waken up from a dream where I was starring in a spectacular musical by my in-room telephone. Out of sorts for being woken twice before the set time, I trundled out of bed to answer the phone but I was too late. I then checked the time and to my aghast it was a quarter past eleven at night. I hustled down to midrats to eat. You must realize that midrats is very important to the night crew. If we miss it we have to go eight hours until breakfast and that makes for some grumpy scientists. I then learned that my roommate hadn't seen me at midrats and was calling to make sure I woke up for it. He's such a nice guy. This all made for one interesting morning. I went upstairs to perform my usual checking of the e-mail and found that our MOCNESS cast wouldn't be until 3:45, so I pittered around for a while, writing a few messages and working up a couple more slides for my presentation. It seems that we were having some traveling problems or difficulty predicting our arrival time or something because the time to station changed to 4:30 and then we didn't truly arrive and stop until 5:00. We usually do our stuff from 1 to 3 so this was a late day. Luckily we worked until a quarter till seven, just in time to get out of my smelly mustang suit and head down to breakfast.

It was a rather chilly evening last night with a stiff breeze and moderately calm seas. We were casting in roughly 140 meter water so the cast took a while, but thanks to my awesome gloves, which are thin, insulated and completely impermeable to water, I made it just fine. I love my gloves. I decided to try a night without wearing them and I spend the next half hour once I got back inside trying to nurse some feeling back into them. The air might not be but in the 40's F but the water is still pretty flipping cold. I haven't been outside today yet, but I imagine that there's no fog, especially since I haven't heard the fog horn yet. Maybe I can have two days of ear-plug free sleep. One can only hope. Anyway, nothing spectacular tonight so I don't have anything really cool to say just yet. There's only six more days until we pull into Dutch Harbor and some of the Coasties I've talked to have been very excited to tell me so. I think they're ready to get off the boat, what do you think? Ha ha, well, I've got a bit of a headache so I'm going to go to sleep. Good night everybody and check back in tomorrow.

I woke up this morning in a very bad humor; it seems that I was dreaming that I my hair was on fire so while sleeping I began furiously scratching and smacking my head, thus waking me up. Like I said, it wasn't the best way to wake up and I wasn't in the best mood. Luckily it was still early (for me) so I just stayed in bed for a while and read one of my books and let myself calm down. By this time it was getting on for supper so I sauntered down to the galley to grab some grub. They had some kind of cajun grilled blackened catfish and at was very tasty. Afterwards I went back upstairs to do some aesthetic renovations to a few of my Excel graphs. I'm still at a creative block with my presentation so hopefully I can get past that before I get off the ship.

Well, since Calvin's NAS went over the side in the afternoon, I wasn't able to work on that but the MOCNESS was scheduled for a sampling station at 2:30 so that worked out pretty well. Sorry, no glowing collection tubes although we did have something of a swarm of jellyfish. They're fairly large with a six inch diameter head and more than likely a meter, at least, of tentacles. I don't know if it's the stinging type and none of us were quick to test it out, so that remains a big unknown. They were floating all through the water though and were very easy to pick out, even in the dark. The fog and clouds decided to take a coffee break this evening so we were able to see the sun before it sank below the horizon. The sea was unbelievably calm today as we sailed west, just south of St. Matthew island. We were able to see several prominent peaks of the whole island. Near the end of the day it turned off a little chilly and the breeze picked up a little bit, but with a jacket all you had to endure were a couple cold ears. Not a bad trade off for the great view. Later on in the night when the sun had already set, the moon rose above the water in the east in all its bright orange glory. It was great so we all ran out to the weather deck to check it out before it rose behind the new cloud cover. It was just a really nice day today and to top it off, there's not a spot of fog this morning. This is a twofold blessing. Not only does it offer a great view but now I can sleep without having to use ear plugs to stop out the sound of the foghorn. I hate that stupid horn.

Anyway, to tie this off, I had breakfast and it was delicious, as usual. I'm currently in the blog writing/e-mail checking mode right now so I'll let you all go for now. Take a lesson from our dastardly polar bear "friends" and stay chilly.

I was supposed to meet Calvin down in the main lab around eight in the evening, but when I woke up, I had the sneaking suspicion that not only was it probably not eight, but it was several hours past it. I had set my pager to chime at eight and couldn't quite figure out why I, once again, slept through the alarm. Even with my earplugs in, I can usually hear it, especially since I put it right by my head before I sleep. The earplugs were a necessity this night since somebody was dismantling a metal cabinet with some kind of electric saw, one of the noisy variety, other people decided to camp out in the hall and hold a loud-but-not-quite-yelling conversation while the stupid fog horn kept on wailing and wailing. So anyway, I pulled the plugs from my ears and checked the pager, only to find that it was a quarter after eleven. "Uh oh!", I thought to myself. "I'm late for midrats." I hustled downstairs to grab some breakfast and met Calvin down there. I apologized for my tardy behavior and he said that the bags were still under heat and the system was still running, so even if I had gone down at eight, I would have had to wait at least four hours before we could do anything. Lucky me. When we finished eating, we headed back to the lab to work out the rest of the kinks in the NAS and get it ready for dumping. Once again, we worked all through the night. I used almost an entire row of electrical tape to button down all the hoses and tubes to make sure the turbulence of the water doesn't rip anything out when it hits. It actually looks very neat and trim. Of course we had to place it in its cage and hook it up with its battery and bags of standards but once all that and the last minute testing were finished, we deemed it ready for deployment. I took a couple of pictures of it when we wrapped up and I'll try to send them on soon. I have to compress them before I can send them and I don't have a means to do that right this minute. I'll get them on, don't worry.

After all that work we went to breakfast and had waffles. It's Wednesday so we have to have something that begins in W, like waffles. "Hey guys, it's waffle Wednesday!" I just went for the potatoes but I snagged a waffle too. It was pretty good. When I had my fill, I wandered on upstairs to tell you all how the evening went. The weather is really nice out right now. There's a stiff breeze and it's a little chilly, which stirs up the waves a bit, but it blew away the fog so you can see quite a ways now. We also sailed just south of St. Matthew island yesterday before sunset and you can see the peaks coming up above the water. I was lucky to snap a few pics of them too. Again, I'll send them on as soon as I can. If you check the site the webmaster posted, I'm sure you can see where we'll be in the next week as we finish up and head back to Dutch Harbor. Keep informed everyone and have a good rest of the day.

Websites for Healy Webcam

Note from the webmaster:

The Coast Guard has updated the Healy website and now made public the webcam images. There is a camera mounted to the Healy's AloftCon (reconaissance tower) that takes a picture every hour and sends it to a website sponsored by the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Check it out! Click on the link below, then when you get to the page, click on the link for Lamont-Doherty. You will then get a list of images for every hour of every day of Charlie's cruise. Click on one to see what its like in the Bering Sea, and use your browser's back button to return to the list to see another image. (It sure does look foggy today).

You can also get a map of where the Healy is located by clicking on the "icefloe" link. Please note that these updates are delayed at least 24hrs.
http://www.uscg.mil/pacarea/cgcHealy/updates/

Lots of Sleep

Post written by Charlie:

For some reason, I was really, really tired this morning. My morning. It was actually late afternoon. I set my alarm to five and although it woke me up, I reset it to seven and promptly fell back to sleep. I did this two more times and finally woke up shortly before eleven. I did the math, using both sets of fingers, and found that I had slept just over thirteen hours. I'm not sure what I did that tired me so, but whatever it was, you would think that I could remember it. Oh well. I made it down to the galley in time for midrats and had a breakfast of half steamed broccoli and squash along with blackened marinated chicken and tater tots. It was pretty good, no complaints. From the galley I went straight to the lab to find that my whereabouts had been inquired into. Do you all remember Calvin, the funny guy whom I helped with the Nutrient Analyzer System (NAS)? Well, it seems that they're tossing it out into the sea tomorrow and he needs to get it ready to go and needs my help. He already had some of the reagent bags already strapped to the NAS and we just needed to test them out. It was a good thing we did since the bags of his NO2 and NO3 standards were dead, meaning that they didn't have any of the nitrogen compounds in them. We're still not quite sure what happened back at his lab when they were prepared, but this put us up a particular creek, leaving us with precious few paddles. Luckily he had a few extra bags with him so we were able to prepare a couple replacement nutrient bags. We're improvising to a great degree here but they should work after they've been sterilized. Anyway, he asked me to come back down at eight this evening to aid him in finishing it all up for deployment the next morning, an offer I happily agreed to. I've spread myself around in the science lab, so much so that I've become an almost necessary helper in various projects. Due to the fact that I was helping Calvin out tonight, I wasn't able to participate in the MOCNESS cast. Later in the night, some of the MOCNESS people came and told me how much more difficult it was without my assistance in guiding the net in and out. Just for those of you who don't know, the frame to the MOCNESS is all steel, and there's a lot of it. Just imagine how heavy it is and we have to shove and heave on it in order to get it in and out of its bracket. After I ran a few sample runs on the NAS to check it out with its current load of chemicals, I was working on and off with Rachel and Karen while every now and again heading over to help Calvin. It seems that I've become a necessary installment to the crew.

After the NAS work, it became time for breakfast. I had worked all through the night and hadn't hardly realized it until the clock hit seven, or in our case, 1500 GMT. So I headed down to the mess deck to snag some chow, but when I got back, I had some more filtering to do. It wasn't so bad. Just put the pipe in the cylinder of water and step back. Fold the filter when through and make sure the container is marked appropriately. After that, I headed up to write this thing, but I had a few e-mails to take care of, which took a couple of hours and now it's lunch time, so now I'll eat a little lunch and head to bed. I hope you all have a great day today and I will talk to you all again soon. I wasn't kidding about asking questions or leaving comments. Please don't hesitate or anything, I'm not going to bite. Anyway, goodnight everyone.

We had another monster station again this early morning, which was around 2:30. Luckily, the bongo and the MOCNESS were able to go first so we were able to get out of the way early. There was something really cool that happened last night though. Do you all remember how I told you that krill and other zooplankton are capable of blue bioluminescence? Well, as the MOCNESS was being towed up to the surfact, while it was still underwater, we were able to see a bright blue sheen come up from under the waves. It seemed that we had caught so many animals in the one bucket and they were all agitated so they all began to glow at the same time and it was breathtaking. I've seen the krill glow in a cooler and resemble the night sky, but this was like a blue reflection of the moon, bright and mysterious, on the face of the water. Unfortunately we weren't expecting it at all so we didn't have cameras ready, but I'll keep a look out next time for all of you. If it happens again, I'll do my best to snap a pic. Aside from that, the evening was pretty much cut and dry. I did get quite a bit of work done on my presentation though, at least five slides, resulting in a grand total of fourteen so far. I'm sure I might edit a few when I'm through, but that's fourteen less than I have to do from now on.

It is a startling 10 more days until we roll back into Dutch Harbor. It's truly hard to believe that we've burned through nearly twenty days already but when looking back, it did go pretty fast. Anyway, I stayed up later than I should have yesterday morning so I'm going to go to bed. Before I go, I just want to repeat my offer of answering any questions. Just write a comment or e-mail me at cm320@lyon.edu and I'll get back to you either in the next blog or in an e-mail. Alright everyone, stay cool and take it easy.

I awoke at ten after five this afternoon and promptly went back to sleep. Knowing that I was hungry and I needed to get up to eat, I immediately woke up again and trunged out of bead to head towards the shower. After a nice easy paced morning of waking up and getting ready, I walked down a couple of decks to participate in the weekly "morale dinner". This is one meal of the week where certain groups get together in the kitchen and make the meal. Tonight was burgers, but I got down a little late so the only warm toppings they had left was bacon and rings of pineapple. Guess what I had put on my burger? Yep, bacon and pineapple rings. Some of the cold toppings was missing too so I had to settle for guacamole dip smeared on a bun with some pepperjack cheese and onions. I just wanted to say that it was one delicious burger. You should try it, you'll be hooked.

Anyway, enough of the food reviews. We recently sailed back to St. Paul island to switch out one of the crew members, who was pregnant, for another one who wasn't and at the same time, we took aboard a new optics machine. I don't know if the optics people are happy or not, I haven't asked them, but I would imagine that they are. Their old unit still sits on the sea floor, but perhaps this one will suffice. We had one monster of a station this morning at 2:30. Basically every instrument we had was being deployed one after the other over the course of about three to four hours. Luckily the bongo nets and the MOCNESS were done within the first three instrument casts so there wasn't much waiting. I spent a couple of hours before then working on my presentation going nowhere. You all know how that feeling is. I need some consultation and I'll get it tomorrow so I get this train moving again. We pulled up the same old, same old, including the seafood gumbo-gruel. It was a bit warmer out this morning than it had been with a little more wind around 3:30. I think this helped blow away the fog because, surprise, surprise, there was none when the sun rose. We actually saw that elusive glowing ball in the sky along with the moon, which looks a little rotated from my customary view back home. All in all, it was a busy night, because right when I finished with the MOCNESS and went inside, there was filtering to be done for the krill growth experiments! Hoo-ray. That took a little bit of time, almost right up til breakfast so there was only a little waiting around while we waited to eat. Since I'm a trifle pooped, I'm going to relax back in my quarters now so peace out, you groovy, blog reading cats. Check in next time for more exciting Bering Sea adventures.