Day 2 at sea

Day 2

Day two aboard the ship saw many of the “dead” rise again. After substantial medication, rest, and projectile vomiting, many of the students have color in their faces and are back on their feet. Appetites are not in full effect but most of the students are coming around. The day started with drills – fire and abandon ship beginning at 10am. This is fairly standard practice and we can expect that once a week, we will be drilled on how to respond to these types of emergencies. We brought most of the instrumentation to the main laboratory for testing and check-out. This means that we took an inventory of all parts, turned them on and warmed up the electronics, performed diagnostic tests, and collected data in the controlled environment of the main laboratory.

Today is Sunday and, like any other day, the work day is pretty relaxed. Since we cannot escape to go anywhere - Sundays and Saturdays are treated the same as any week day. Breaks can be taken at any time to watch the sun set, to view the waves, clouds, and horizon, or to just sit and think. The work is always just a few steps away. This is both good and bad. One has to pace themselves in order to allay the monotony of the ship environment. From time to time, I find that I am beset with bouts of insomnia where I may go for days staying up until 3 or 4am simply because there is always something to do and no where to go.

Each student has been tasked out with a particular set of measurements. This may be a particular instrument or set of activities associated with a shared instrument. Most of the students are busy with their assigned activities and slipping into a routine. They are asking lots of questions and frantically trying to get their instruments to work. This is good, especially since we have so many new students aboard this cruise. Our next step will be to get the students accustomed to the more hectic pace when an actual event occurs. At those times, one has to move quickly but cogently. Deviation from proper protocols could mean complete loss of quality data. Moving too methodically could mean losing out on a rare opportunity to collect the data. Experience and luck are both critical for a successful field experiment. Luck is required for the optimal conditions to occur and experience allows us to predict how to be in the right place at the right time as well as to do the right thing at the right time. Trying to prepare the students for the first dust event presents an additional challenge. All of the practice, rhetoric, and theory crystallize into actuality at the moment of truth. This is the common yoke of the academic scientist in the field but when you are successful, there is not many a sweeter fruit of your labor. In any event, we should intercept a significant dust plume in the next two days. This means that all equipment and personnel needs to be ready to collect data and/or samples in fairly short order.

I finally completed my IT survey which means that I can hook up to the local network. I was the last person to complete this – partly due to procrastination and partly due to the workload. Hopefully, I can remain on the two or three internet connections per day schedule and refrain from the “eternal connection status” that I enjoy when on land. The hardest habit to break from while out here is the need for constant communication. Its only 8:30 pm now, a full five hours earlier than I started writing my Day 1 blog. I guess things are getting better.