I've just finished sailing nearly 3,000 nautical miles from Pago Pago, American Samoa to Auckland, Aotearoa (also known as New Zealand). Along the way, I stopped in Vava'u, Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha'apai, and Nuku'alofa in the Kingdom of Tonga and Suva, Fiji.
When we're sailing the boat never stops. A Watch group is always awake to keep the boat on track to get to our next destination. And because this is a scientific sailing vessel, we would also be in the lab collecting data or processing it at all hours of the day. There were 26 students and we were divided into 3 groups. We had 6 hours on watch and 12 hours off to rest, eat, shower, read, journal, and do any homework we had. Through those 6 hours on you and your Watch would either be on deck or processing in the lab. While on the deck, one person had to be on the lookout (as pictured!), someone else at the helm steering the boat, someone was recording the weather, and another was on a boat check to make sure the lab wasn't on fire or something was out of place on board. We would be in those positions for an hour before switching off to the next task. If you were in the lab, you had a list of things to do depending on the time of day. Twice in a 24-hour day period, we would deploy a neuston tow to collect zooplankton. Once a day, we would deploy a hydrocast to collect water samples from different depths of the ocean to better understand the water we were sailing above. If you happened to be on watch during a time with no deployments needed, you would often be processing the data collected from the previous watch. Let me tell ya trying to do a 100 count of zooplankton with a microscope on a moving vessel is something else! The boat is moving, you are swaying, and the zooplankton sample is actively sloshing too!
There was so much going on while on the ship I don't know how I could possibly sum it all up!
No comments:
Post a Comment