Final Post

Post written by Charlie:

Well everyone, I am sad to inform you that this will be the final blog that I write, as the trip is over and I'll be finishing my business here in Maryland and shortly be heading back home to Arkansas. I had a great time and saw several things that were quite amazing to behold and I'm sure I probably won't have the chance to see some of them again, but who knows? Maybe I will. Anyway, I hope you all had a blast reading them because I sure did writing them. I also hope that you were able to glean something from my often random ramblings and that they served at least a marginally educational purpose. You've all been a great crowd and I want to thank you all for all your consistent visits to the MOGEL site to read them. As far as I know, the blog will stay up for a while at the same location, so if you'd like, in the future, grab an interested friend and show it to them. My address is still on several of them so feel free to contact me if any of you have any questions about anything I have or have not written. Again, thank you all for your efforts and occasional comments. I wish you all the best and I hope you have a wonderful year.

Hey everyone, this will probably be the last blog I'll write for a couple days, since I'm going to be traveling pretty much non-stop from Dutch to D.C. for a couple of days and I won't have readily available internet access. I should say that the current plan is to do such a thing. There's a volcano to the east of us that's been erupting for the past month or so and the flights to Anchorage were canceled today due to stuff in the air. I didn't see anything myself but apparently there must have been something out there to necessitate a cancellation of those flights. Naturally this makes me fearful about the status of my one o'clock flight. I really don't want to hang around Dutch Harbor longer than I have to. I really want to get back to Maryland and call it a day, but we'll just have to see how it's going to go.

Today's blog should be pretty short. Since we've already packed everything up, I can't really say anything science-y. We pulled into the harbor around nine this morning and we were finally able to get off the boat around ten. It felt pretty good to be able to walk in a straight line for longer than a few yards or so. I went down to the Alaska Ship Supply store for some stuff to remember the times by, other than pictures and memories. We then later walked into town to go to the WWII museum but they're closed for some reason and will be until the seventh of August. Bummer, so we walked around a poked around the post office and some random grocery store. Yes, we were kind of looking for things to do. I don't usually check out a post office if I can help it. Anyway, we did that for a while and then went to dinner. I had this long roll of sushi from a sushi bar in town. It was really good and quite a difference from the food on the ship. By this time it was getting on in the hours so I rode back to the ship with a few other people and I'm in the middle of packing up my belongings in the hopes that we CAN leave tomorrow. Take it easy everyone and thanks for reading. I hope you got something out of this because I believe that I did.

I was woken up this morning at two by a room call for the MOCNESS. I left a note on the Board of Lies asking somebody to give me a call when it went out and sure enough, somebody did. I hustled down to the lab from my stateroom as fast as I could and got out on the weather deck. Alexei wanted to do another live cast to see if he could catch some pregnant krill and like last night, there were none. He just wanted to make sure and now he was. We weren't going to catch any pregnant krill. They already ran their cycle or they haven't gotten around to it yet. We also had some rather unpleasant visitors last night. We caught the fringe of it last night but tonight there was a full fledge swarm of jellyfish. In every net collection bucket on the MOCNESS, we caught at least three jellyfish. Their tentacles covered the machine as we pulled it up out of the sea and then got stuck to your gloves and mustang suit. Like last night, we did three casts but only one live one. After the third cast, Jillian, the teacher who's been co-launching the MOCNESS, went to bed. She's really been putting in some long hours and needed some rest so I helped Alexei dismantle the MOCNESS. We really didn't tear it apart all that much but we did take off all the nets for cleaning, all nine of them. Now it's just a frame and it looks a lot different. As you might imagine, the MOCNESS is kind of worthless without nets and there is a good reason we took them off and that's because we're DONE! No more MOCNESS casts! Woohoo! Our last cast was on the third to last station of the cruise and even as I'm typing this, we're finishing up the very last station. After this it is a straight shot back to Dutch Harbor. A straight transit should take about 10 or 11 hours or so. When we get back to port, we have the day to do as we please so we were thinking about maybe going hiking on some mountain paths or perhaps going to the WWII museum. Until then, since we have all our stuff packed up, everyone can take a breath of fresh air and kick back for a little relaxation from all of our frenzied packing and cleaning. Just a few more of these before I head back to Maryland. I hope you stick around until the end. Until then everyone.

I had quite a bit to do last night and boy did it feel great. I woke up an hour before midrats so I went down to the scientist's lounge and talked with Pat and Tracy for about an hour. This of course made it time for midrats so we went down and ate. I ate some chicken pot pie stuff which was had a WHOLE lot of black pepper but it was pretty good. They also had those french toast sticks again. I've never eaten those before I came on board and I'm really taking a fancy to them. I like the texture better than the real thing.

Anyway, after I finished eating my breakfast I went down to the lab. Tracy told me that Rachel left a note with tasks for me to do while she slept and I was awake. I expected a hastily scrawled note but I found a neatly folded piece of printer paper with my name neatly printed on the outside fastened to the Board of Lies. I opened it and was surprised to see that it was typed in a rather formal prose. The instructions were quite clear but the task was simple: finish acid washing those carboys. That wasn't so bad, there were only seven or so left so I finished in an hour. When I was done, I went to get ready for the MOCNESS casts. We had three of them back to back to back last night and I didn't take off my mustang suit until I was completely done. We started about 1:30 and finished just a quarter after six. It was a long morning, but like I said before, it felt pretty good to be doing something. You might be wondering why we're doing so many MOCNESS casts in one evening. That would be a good question, if you were thinking it. If you weren't, just sit back and let me explain. Alexei was doing multiple casts trying to collect pregnant krill. You can tell that they're pregnant because a significant of their insides are blue. I believe that's because they're full of eggs and they're ready to pop (not literally). Alexei wanted these krill so he could raise them in captivity and part of his experiments with them would form a backbone for our lipofuscin centered krill-aging experiments. He would have krill of precisely known age and he could cut off their eyes and see how much lipofuscin each one has. By doing this to several krill, all of known age, for a span of two years and taking lipofuscin measurements, he can form a standard curve of krill age versus amount of lipofuscin. Roughly speaking, this curve would allow anyone to take a lipofuscin measurement and based on the curve, determine how old that particular krill was. Unfortunately, after three casts we didn't get a single pregnant krill. I asked Alexei about it and he said that a couple of years ago he was getting pregnant krill all the way up until August. He also said that the year in discussion was a warmer year and this is a colder year, so perhaps that factors in somewhere. There are so many other variables that it's hard to pin one down without thoroughly checking the matter out. Last night was supposed to be the last adventures I had with the MOCNESS but Alexei wants to give it one more go just to see whether or not last night was a horrible fluke. I think we'll be just as disappointed this coming night as we were last night, but that remains to be seen.

Well, we're done cleaning so we've been helping other people out as much as we can. We also had a big group photo after lunch with all the science people and the coasties. I hope I wasn't squinting as it was very cloudy and thus very bright, not to mention that they didn't give a customary countdown. Well, I've got a few hours to go until I'll go to sleep, probably around eight or so. I hope everybody is having as splendid a week as I am. Tune in next time as there won't be very many of these left. Get your enjoyment while you can, and remember that if you want to ask me anything about science or living on the Bering for a month, my offer of accepting e-mails directed to cm3620@lyon.edu still stands. Long days and pleasant nights.

Today was a little different from the last several I've gone through. Again, we didn't have a MOCNESS or a bongo cast, but when I went down to the science lab I found that Rachel and Karen were packing up lots of our stuff. I thought that we were going to dismember krill tonight and stack up the vials for transport back to Maryland but evidently to do so we should have started a few days ago. We were left with too little time so we're just packing and cleaning. Speaking of cleaning, do you all remember from my first blogs where I described the long special filtering we did with the seawater? Each run filled up a 20 liter container called a carboy and we filled up quite a few, not to mention that we have several extras hanging around the lab. Tonight it was my job to clean them. I washed each of them with dish soap, for starters. Their second rinse involved this little soapy mix of super cleaning solution called RBS. The third and last rinse involved using 5% HCl. Thankfully I accidentally brought my chem lab apron with me on the boat so I donned that, a pair of gloves and some safety glasses. I probably didn't need to worry about much but I like my clothes without blemishes or holes if I can help it. I drew lots of comments about my appearance from my other colleagues. I won't go into all the little jokes and quips I received but some of them were pretty funny. Anyway, I ran out of acid about half way through so I'm waiting for more to be made. I talked to Alexei, my MOCNESS boss, about when we're doing another MOCNESS and he said that we'll probably do three or so this coming night. I've been trying to revert back to a regular awake-during-the-day schedule so I've been awake for several afternoons but this uberlong MOCNESS casting is going to take a toll on my efforts. Hopefully it'll be just a day or two as I'd really hate to do this all the way back to Dutch, but what must be done must be done. So it goes.

So, aside from my carboy cleaning capers, I didn't really do much else, since that took quite a bit of time. Have you ever tried to wash out all the suds from a giant plastic container from concentrated dish soap? No? Well, it takes a while, so it took up the entire night and morning. It did feel good to stay busy for such a long time though.

After I ran out of acid it was roughly an hour till lunch, so I picked up my book for a while to wait it out. We had french dip sandwiches and they were really good. Lots of onions and horseradish. Boy, were they tasty. Well, I don't want to start in with food reviews so I'll just go ahead and sign off for now. Talk to you later.

Today was kind of eventful. I slept through the scientists morale dinner where several of us were supposed to cook for the entire crew. It seems that the day crew took care of it and that all the night crew people I talked to slept right through it. When people who went found out that I missed it, they were all too eager to tell me how good it was and how unfortunate it was that I missed the BEST meal of the whole cruise. Jerks.

Anyway, I slept pretty late to recoup from my long time of wakefulness so when I woke up I went right to midrats. They had nacho fixings with lots of sour cream and big chunks of onions, so naturally I was very satisfied. I spent a while checking e-mail and other stuff and came down around three a.m. to help out with filtering and did that on and off till breakfast. The Sunday breakfast specialty is eggs benedict and they were very good. We really didn't have anything else to do after that so I kind of wandered around for a while. I eventually found my way to a computer and checked the mail. I'm a little out of the loop with the rest of the world so I thought I might catch the tail end of some of the world's dealings but I didn't find anything really interesting. It wasn't too long before Gary, the resident aquatic mammal expert, came in to do his thing and I got to talking with him. It seems that yesterday we sailed right past a dead walrus. He said it was pretty bloated and floating on its back. Also, it has some pretty long tusks. We both found this very interesting but at the time the boat neglected to run this announcement over the P.A. system. Oh well, I'm sure the day sleepers, me included, wouldn't appreciate being woken up to the blaring announcement that we found a bloated walrus carcass.

I didn't feel very sleepy after breakfast so I stayed up for a while reading a book I found in the library. Usually I'm sleeping at this time, and it is Sunday, so I figured I go to the church service they hold upstairs. It was pretty cool and fairly laid back. The ExO was there along with several other members of the crew along with one of our science crew. It was an informal setting so we all had a good time. I came back to my room, watched a little bit of the ship-wide movie channel, read a little bit of my book and then realized I hadn't written my blog yet, so here I am. Tonight should be a little busies that last night. Rachel says that we might cut a bunch of krill eyes off and store them in as many 4ml amber vials we have in methanol, but we also have to take these samples back to Maryland with us. Evidently the airlines have a big to-do about carrying methanol on jetliners so I'm not really sure what we're going to do. Rachel will know what to do. She's our team leader and that title comes with experience, so I'm sure she's been around this bend before. Anyway, I'm going to retire to my rack for a bit so I'll bid you all a fond farewell until tomorrow. Cheers!

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.