Ship Life

It’s 5:36, the sun is just breaking through the foamy line of scattered cumulus clouds hovering over the horizon. The water’s pretty calm today. There’s one dark seabird gliding over its surface. Sun is completely out of the clouds at this point and once again I’m mesmerized by the way it makes the spray glow and shines through the little waves, pulled up thin like taffy.

How special it is to live at sea, even if briefly. My whole world is reoriented, upturning the routines of the usual, pre-ship life. Now life is the twice daily spectacles of sunrise and sunset (twice weekly showers when times are busy), irregular working hours (although maybe some are already well acquainted with this), and a closely interdependent team made up of those aboard the Seamans.

The other night after dinner I spent a few hours talking with friends about what we cherish the most in recorded memories like in journals, photos, voice memos. More often than not what really distinguished periods of were the everyday details, mundanities like sitting at a kitchen table or walking to class.

So how about I give you a glimpse of such details at sea. A blog post worth of today’s ship life, the fundamentally mundane of our new lives that makes being out here at sea special. Perhaps I’ll sprinkle in some more visibly exciting happenings to keep you awake. There’ve been days I’ve barely been able to contain my excitement, anyway.

Of the things I expected to bring me joy on this voyage, I didn’t think meals would be so high on the list. With the shockingly rich variety of food stores on board, each of us students could be a part of planning the three meals and three snacks for a day. We set to work early with the stewards, Nevin and Jake. I’m so grateful for them, their enthusiasm for opening up the galley to us, the generous care they take for the team in decorated whiteboard menus, multi-layered birthday cakes, and their way of making sure everyone is well fed.

I enjoy one of the fresh raspberry muffins for breakfast, replacing my dish and fork on the table for the second seating of breakfast. We all chip in that way here.

After that I go up the ladder (what are “stairs”?) up to the charthouse, where a piece of paper in a sheet protector is held to a corkboard with one tack. I have morning watch today, where I and my fellow A Watch group is split between working on the boat deck and the lab as usual.

I’m on deck, and it’s time for a boat check. That is, I walk around the deck checking for anything out of place or potentially hazardous, then go down below and do the same. I always leave the engine room for last. It was, like, 110 degrees down there. But I had heard people say it was 130 when they went down, so this wasn’t so bad at all--although, JP, one of our engineers, was there and told me people liked to round their numbers up a bit. I erased the grease pencil marks from the scratch clipboard and slipped on the least sweat-slicked hair of hearing protection muffs. Numbers were all normal. Poop was off; there was a science deployment in progress. Bilge water hadn’t changed, I noted, before bonking my head on whatever pipe I forgot was there.

Initialing in the log book for my finished boat check and emerging onto deck—ah, what cool breeze!—was unfailingly a fine experience.

For fifteen minutes every moving daytime hour, there would be our regular bird observation session. “Bird obs?” I would ask, and be asked. I was always game for picking up a pair of binoculars and scrutinizing the water for seabirds, and I was thrilled that as time went on, quite a few others were, too. When lucky we found shearwaters, petrels, boobies, terns, frigatebirds, and more. This morning, however, we only got one flying fish. Which isn’t even a bird. Extremely cool fish, though. Akshay said he saw one fly continuously for 17 seconds. I saw one close to the boat while on lookout at the bow today. It was thin and silvery and had purple wings that wavered until it splashed back into a wave.

There was better luck with both birds and fish later in the afternoon. I was off watch by then. “Bird obs?” I asked Sophia. She was also always down, and I really appreciated that. We stared out for about 13 minutes, seeing little despite the high chlorophyll we’ve been seeing in our seawater flow-through system. Until, that is, someone shouted there was an aggregation on the starboard side. Aggregations were exciting, many tens of birds swooping around a patch of water. This time they were circling a patch of violent splashes that Barb recognized to be from none other than her beloved tuna.

“Tuna school!” Skipjacks, she said. Almost immediately the ship steered to the right and we were pursuing the tuna. I scrambled over to the bow for a better view and caught as many photos of distant splashes in hopes of getting a tuna in frame. We had a skipjack caught on the line just earlier, actually, and Saf, Olin, and Josh made a 3D scan of the fish with their nifty device before it was filleted. We’ve been eating good here, trust me.

Another time I stared at photos was when identifying bird species with Yuchen and Boris. With these photo references we had covered the gimballed salon (dining room) tables with bird books, picking out subtle field marks like the slightly dark trailing edge of the petrel’s wings to determine with confidence what it was. I was glad we had these chances to do this type of detective work again, and with someone with long time ecology and birding experience that Boris had.

Cap turns out to be a hilarious storyteller. Going back in the day here, we’re in class at 1430. Our captain steps over to a clear spot on the deck with his aviator shades and begins with the tale of a rope who keeps getting kicked out of bars. “Hey… hey… I know you. You’re that rope!” The punchline followed the rope changing its appearance, the rope no longer a rope: “I’m afraid not.”

With that we began what appeared to be a traditional event for sailing students: the pin chase. For the last several days we’ve been walking around the ship with a labeled chart of all the lines, their names, and what pins they were fastened to. Now we had a relay race between watch groups to go find a given pin. We cheered and sped walked and came in just a hair behind C Watch. Conga lining to the front of the boat after some of us (myself included) barely learned many of the lines this morning, I think we did a job to be proud of.

Back to a more boring topic, I took a shower. It was a glorious evening shower on deck, where not only do you get to scrub the grit from your salty-sticky limbs, but you witness a fiery sunset to the west and the barest outlines of Nuku Hiva to the northeast. And when I rinsed off, instantly the still-warm (ever-warm) air rushed to dry me. Next came the bucket laundry, which I operated out of one of those pop-up laundry baskets. There was also a washboard available to us, but the ancient-looking thing was a more controversial tool. Once I hung my clothes to dry, I sat with Audrey and Jordan for some ukulele and song until dinner. I could get used to this being normal.

The last bit of the night, besides going to the tiny library and writing this, I spent thinking about research projects. It’s about that time for many of our groups where the data collection was ramping up. This was certainly true for Yuchen and me. We were getting into some very interesting territory, looking at recent surface chlorophyll maps around the Marquesas. Not everything had gone according to plan, though. The winch we were going to use to tow instruments was mysteriously not working, and the winds restricted our tow course. But, our situation was certainly still workable, and if it is worth something it’s a test of our ability to adapt and experience the random nature of field work. Anyway, we got a setup working on the J frame off the science deck, where we and our peers would share the responsibility of sending the winch wire in and out.

It became really clear to me how much we relied on each other here. Others would handle the work of data collection that the two of us couldn’t ever manage on our own, and 24/7 we were also processing water and measuring tiny pelagic critters essential to our friends’ projects. This was far from limited to science. We were depending on each other for safety, for a thriving community, for challenging our senses.

Maybe it’s not as easy to see, but I would imagine that holds true for off-ship life as well. I’ve asked myself more than once what I am doing here, chugging along on a sailboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I wouldn’t have guessed from the beginning that a huge part of what I take away is seeing directly in front of me just how important it is to take care of each other for all of our successes.