07 November – Groundhog Day (on a boat)
Joe Warren
So a research cruise like ours is a bit like the movie “Groundhog Day”, where Bill Murray wakes up each morning and realizes he’s repeating the same day over and over again. We have 7 sites on this cruise, and at each site we have (essentially) the same set of tasks that we repeat over and over again spending 1-2 days at each site before transiting to the next one. The nice part about this is that the new folks onboard get to figure out how things work and then get some practice in the various aspects of a research cruise (i.e. deploying the different nets, processing samples, eating snacks, eating some more snacks). Everybody has gotten their sea legs, and we’ve finally gotten a few days of good weather so we’re in the middle of our 3rd site as I write this (at 0500 on Nov 7th which is an hour away from the end of our shift). Our night crew is working well already which means they can handle more and more responsibility when it comes to getting our gear safely in and out of the water.
When I’m not being Chief Scientist, I spend some time taking “glamour shots” of the various animals that we’ve caught in our nets which I find fascinating because of the diversity of types of animals that live in the open ocean. You saw some great photos by Julia Notar on Rachel Eckley’s blog (Julia is actually studying marine animal vision so I’m pretty sure that’s an unfair advantage), but here are some photos of some of the lesser-known critters we collect out here.
Lastly, HUGE shoutout to Mike Duffy and James Bennet (the Chief Steward and Mess Attendant on the RV Endeavor) who made the best brussel sprouts for dinner tonight. They were delicious. Having good food on the ship makes everything else on this ship work more smoothly so we really appreciate them keeping us well fed.
