South Africa to Brazil

So for those who are keeping in touch I will be updating soon. So far the trip has gone well. It was a long flight, but full of adventure and great people. I unfortunately don't have a South African electrical converter to charge my Mac so I have to go to the boat in the next day or two and upload some pictures and a bit of a story. Stay tuned!

Natural Beauty

The weather isn't always horrible out here, just 90% of the time! I sleep through the day being on the midnight shift, but most of the time the weather is usually getting better as we get of shift. During out shift we usually deal with some combination of rain, wind, waves, snow, sleet, fog, and cold, but every once in a a while we get a treat. Mother nature concedes her turbulent forces to reveal her tranquil inimitable beauty. I don't know if it's just being deprived of what a sunset or sunrise looks like, but I feel like I've never scene such vibrant and awe inspiring colors that penetrate straight to your soul. There's something comforting standing on a deck in the middle of the ocean, hundreds of miles away from the closest land, enjoying the little glimpses of natures brilliance. I hope these helps to convey that.

-J

CDT operations

I'm going to try and do a series on our research operations over the next several days whenever I can spare some time. It's been consistently busy for the past week. We have been sampling every 30-40 miles or so, which gives us about 3-4 hours of down time between stations. This made the shifts go by dreadfully slow, but it gave me time to work on my thesis. The distances between stations depends on what the lead scientist, Jim Ledwell, feels is best for detection of the tracer, which was injected into a specific density layer on last years cruise. From what I've deduced is that the stations are longer along the zonal, east/west, lines and closer together for the meridional, north/south, lines. For obtaining the water samples a large cylindrical steel frame is used known as a rosette. This is used to house the niskin bottles, which are the long gray cylindrical tubes encased within the inner circumference of the rosette for collecting the individual water samples at predetermined depths. These depths are chosen to coincide with the density level at which the tracer was injected to see how it has spread both zonally and meridionally as well as vertically. The CDT, which stands for conductivity, depth, and temperature, is an instrument used to measure just that. Then the density is calculated from the temperature and salinity (from conductivity) and then we can determine the depths where the density layer containing the tracer is. They are triggered to close electronically from the computer lab inside the ship by sending a signal through the winch wire, which has electrical wire encased so that each bottle can be triggered individually at the correct depth. There is also an ADCP, or Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler, which measures the currents. My duties are to safely deploy and retrieve the rosette at the stations. First we have to prep the bottles so that they are open on the way down. Then for deployment we wheel out the rosette onto the side deck where we attach tag lines to to control it as the winch picks it up and puts it over the railing.
For retrieval we used hooks that slide into the end of a 20 foot pole. We then hang them over the edge and try our best to hook the rosette frame as soon as it breaks the surface of the water. What may seem like a simple operation becomes exponentially more difficult when you add in 30-40 mph winds and 20+ seas, as well as rain/snow. If the tag lines aren't there quickly the rosette becomes a 1500 lb wrecking ball!! Although it does tend to make things interested when the weather isn't ideal, which is a good portion of the time. I almost feel like I'm on Deadliest Catch sometimes when waves are breaking over the sides and water is rushing over my knees on deck! You really feel pretty insignificant when a wave goes by and blocks the horizon as it rolls by about 3 or 4 feet over your head and you aren't sure whether or not it's going to come over the rail or not! Hopefully this wasn’t too nerdy or boring or both!

-J

Weekend In Port

So this starts of with a bit of bad news. Last week our captain, Phil, fell ill and passed away. We had to turn around and return to port in Punta Arenas to drop his body off. It was a pretty crazy and surreal experience. To make things worse we had to travel through 20+ seas to get back, which slowed us down by about a day. We had to sit in port for about 6-8 hours waiting for the weather to calm down enough to approach the dock. The boat quickly became saturated with Chilean authorities of all sorts. We had a memorial service for the captain on the back deck.

On a lighter note we were back in port for two days! I was glad that we came back b/c my computer crashed and I lost all my pictures of the Strait of Magellan and wouldn't have been able to take more since we would be coming back a different way. Also it gave me some time to go out on the town and explore a little more. They have bikes on the boat, which is really convenient and quite brilliant as I would not have thought to have them on board. It makes sense though if you think about it. So we, Andrew and Angel, borrowed a couple of the bikes and went and explored Punta Arenas. Being in the Andes it gets steep relatively quickly and you can see in the picture we only road a mile or two and were able to get a pretty amazing view of Punta and the bay. You can partially see our ship in you look in front of the huge cruise ship and just past the left side of the blue roofed building. There was a nice little coffee shop right next to where I took this and we stopped in for a drink. Right outside the cafe they had a few wooden poles with signs of cities around the world and what direction and how far they where from Punta. I looked and they didn't have Pensacola, but they did have Houston! So Sarah I knew that you were 9487 km away from me at the exact moment! We ended up riding around for about 5 hours. On the way back we stopped by the Square where they have a pretty cool statue. It has a native chilean? with a worn bronze foot that you can see at the bottom right. Everyone rubs in and takes pictures with it. I think it is supposed to give you good luck. I did it, but I wasn't all that happy about it not being a big foot person. I think the naked lady would have been a better specimen personally.

We returned to the ship and put the bikes back in storage and got cleaned up for dinner. We went to this cool restaurant that had an open flame cooking the lamb that I would soon consume. They are supper nice and the let us in the room and took our pictures next to it. I'm not sure how the health inspectors would feel about that in the U.S., but I don't think they could give two shits down here! I think they do it so that you will order it being the most expensive thing on the menu, which I believe was about $9,500 Chilean or about $18 US dollars! It was absolutely delicious and they aren't shy in there serving size. I couldn't even finish it all, but I think that's more due to the fact that lamb is a pretty rich meat. We had a great bottle of wine to go along with it and just had a great evening. I've really enjoyed the Chilean wine and hope to bring a couple bottles back, which I think is all that you are allowed by customs. After that we went to a cool little bar under one of the hotels that surrounds the Square and ran into a crew from a NOAA boat that had just got into port. We ended up hanging out with them for a while and eventually making our way to the Disco with a few of them. We got there about 11pm local time and didn't leave until around 4am and there were no signs of it closing anytime soon. The local women really seemed to enjoy my beard, which caught me off guard since it is slowling consuming my face. I had a few of them just come up and rub it, perhaps making sure it was real!. So they weren't shy to say the least, at least with me. I was under the impression that they women down here where more on the conservative side. This worked out great for me b/c I ended dancing with them throughout the night and had a great time experiencing the Chilean disco scene!

We've since headed back to the open ocean to continue our research. I'm going to try to get an entry of our daily operations when we deploy our instruments at the stations. Hope you enjoyed.

-J

Straits of Magellan

We left port early this morning before I woke up, which was around 9am. We left Punta Arenas, as well as the Atlantic Ocean and have been traveling throught the Strait of Magellan where we are sheduled to enter the South Pacific around midnight! These island mountain chains are just everywhere. It looks like you are about to enter open ocean and then another mountain peak comes out of the clouds. It's been a pretty surreal experience to say the least. HD tv doesn't have shit on this! It really is hard to describe even with the picutures, I feel like I'm not doing a just job! I've posted a few pics of out travels though the strait. I had to compress them down to practically nothing to be able to upload them so I hope the quality isn't to bad. If it's decent I should be able to keep this up whenever I have something other than water to take a picture of! Hope you enjoy! The ship as been relatively smooth through the strait, but the seas are supposed to be considerably larger once we enter the Pacific. Once we hit that it's pretty much no land for the next 50 days!

-J

Last Day in Port

It was a busy day getting our instrument, the Deep This is our last night in port. It was a busy day getting our instrument, the DeepMicrostructure Profiler, put together. I finally figured out how to upload pictures so here are a few pictures I taken. This is the ship we will be spending all our time on. The back is where all the research happens as your can see all the wenches for lifting and deploying instruments. The other pictures are my living quarters! I share the room, but it's not to bad, although I say this before I have actually spent a night on the ship!! We ship off at 9 in the morning tomorrow and I will be working the midnight to noon shift. It's going to be weird adjusting to the sleep schedule, but won't be too bad since most of the day is daylight anyways. So far the ships food has been excellent, but I'm told the quality tapers off as the fresh foods are exhausted! I'll try to keep updates as frequently as possible, but these will most likely be the only pictures until I get back.

ciao,
-J

In Port

Skipping ahead to start on a good note the food and wine here is amazing! The beef and pork is out of this world and the local wine is exquisite! I may try to get a few bottles back, but it is proving to be more of a problem than it is worth. Going back to the beginning the flight was horrible! Nobody should have to travel for 24 straight hours. That is too long for anyone to sit in a seat and/or layovers. The ship I'm going to be on is awesome and the crew is great. We have gone out the past two nights and everyone is enjoying themselves before we are stuck with ship food and now alcohol! I've been recently informed that internet access on the ship is going to be more difficult than expected. Out individual computers aren't going to be able to access the internet so the only connection will be through the few on board computers connect to skynet, which is equivalent to a 56k telephone connect. In short it is unlikely I will be able to skype, upload pictures, or regularly update my blog. This is rather disappointing, but I will have to spread word through minimal emails and word of mouth. Everything else will come after the trip in one big chunk!

Adios,

-J