A sailor's poem

I will simply say that this has been a nice day. As always the gulf weather is unpredictable. In most of the daylight hours we spent either in the rain or under a grey sky. Just before sunset the sky began to clear. Even though I have yet to see the gulf waters lite up by the sun, I was able to witness some spectacular beauty. At around 6:00 PM you could capture a rainbow on the stearn and a sunset on the bow. Charlie, one of the CSIRO scientists, and I were flitting from the front and the back of the boat snapping photos and watching the waters slosh by as we moved away from the sunset.

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I convinced Bob, our engineer, that even though he had seen a million gulf sunsets that everyone was unique and worth getting up to see. So he finally got up and went to check it out.

Beginning of sunset

Near the end

Afterwards Bob told me their is a sailors saying ' Red skies in mornin' sailors take warning, red skies at night sailors delight'.  Delight indeed.

Science log 4- Mission CTD

Short summary.
We finnnnalllly left the port at 5:00 PM. The finishing touches on the deck started fairly early. In fact, the ship's first mate, Brian, peeked his head into my room at 7:45 AM to get me up because the port workers had arrived and their supervisor needed to speak to me about the exact jobs that needed to be completed. This just happened to be a morning I decided to hit the snooze button and sleep for 20 more minutes. Oh well.
Since they started the job so early I was certain they would have it done by 12:00-1:00 PM.  How wrong I was. The job probably finished at around 3:00 PM. By this time, all the crew is once again restless and about tired of waiting in the dock. I have started to notice that being out at sea is a sort of adrenaline rush. The longer you just sit in a sea-going vessell the madder and more eager to sail you become. I can't be sure, but just the fact that we are moving makes the ship seem less closed in. The whole sea becomes your home.

Right before we departed Cpt. Bill called a quick safety meeting to go over the new equipment and overall ship set-up. Everything was secured on deck and we finally set off. During the first hour the ship scientist and I finalized the map, with the help of our GIS specialist and the captain. This planned cruise route is specifically targeting several natural seeps in the gulf. It should be an interesting task to locate the exact position of the seep in order to drop the CTD over the ship, but possible with some practice. By the end of the cruise the staff and scientists should be experts at this. Especially with the combination of the echosounder, fluorometry, and documented coordinates.

We completed a test CTD cast at around 10:30 PM and are now headed for the first official site locality in the morning. I have not pulled my pictures off to show, but will soon get to that.

I will write more tomorrow after I have had a nice 6-7 hour nap (fingers crossed).

Ship break

Port Fouchon, Louisiana

After arriving in Port Fouchon, Louisiana I have had a short hiatus on my blogging for two reasons. 1) The ship has been grounded in port for some 'minor' modifications and 2) I had to travel to New Orleans to meet with those in charge at the UAC.  Even though I have only been on this boat for a few days it was kinda hard for me to watch it change. This seems to be a pattern in the shipping industry, everything is dynamic or subject to high amounts of flux. It ranges from the weather to the sea conditions to the ship crew. Even those things change there is a constant that remains- the Captain and the overall skeleton of the ship.
So basically in the past 2 days the ship has gone through a dramatic transformation. This includes the addition of a CTD sensor. CTD stands for conductivity, temperature, and depth. It is a very important tool for determining the properties of sea water and can provide precise data on the variation of temperature, salinity, pH, and density. In addition, this CTD has a methane and dissolved oxygen sensor. As part of the research we will also attach the most sensitive fluorometer to measure the hydrocarbon concentrations at depth. This is very exciting because we can collect a wide range of data up to 1500 m depth!  Exciting work ahead. In order to get this peice of equipment on the ship there needed to be a few modifications. There was an addition of a large A-frame for the deployment and also two large winches that help in the deployment process. The ole ship literally had its deck cut off in pieces and the barrier cut to make way for the A-frame platform.

Construction on the ship at view of bridge

Side of ship that A-frame will be placed

During the majority of the construction I spent my time in meetings in New Orleans making plans for the next ship's mission in the gulf. This was lots of fun especially being in the heart of the UAC. The strangest observation I had during my time there was that the US Coast Guard seemed very limited in diversity not in a male/female sense. I am not sure why that caught my attention it was simply an observation. They are all so well dressed and formal in their activities, I felt quite bizarre as a 'civilian'. To be honest, even though I was on land for a while, I still had my sea legs and was itching to get back out to sea. Hopefully tomorrow morning it will happen. In the meantime I spent 2 evenings in New Orleans hanging out with a different friend each night. Friends I had not seen in a while. One friend, Jeff, is a friend from graduate school. He just got a position as a geology instructor for UNO and then my friend, Robert. Robert was an old high school friend. We had a good time re-living some of the experiences we had and then learning a little more about our life during the past 5 years. All and all, it was just lovely to stroll down Royal street and the remainer of the quarter while in good company and being in the completely lovely New Orleans evening weather.

Mississippi River cruise

What to write......

Today I slept in late. I went to bed at around 1:00 and awoke at nearly 9:30, dragged myself to the shower, and arrived in my office pod by 10:15. During the night 2 more vertical casts were made and when I awoke we had just entered the southwest pass of the Mississippi River delta and were heading north to Venice. It was a slow trek upriver and I spend several moments simply looking at the surrounding delta scenery and watching the mighty Mississippi and all it's boat traffic drift by. This part of the day went slowly but as the day wore on things sped up. The trip up the river and back down is analogous to the kind of day I had. At the surface everything moved steady and smooth, with tini ripples undulating on the surface, but underneath the river water and all its bedload rushed quickly to the sea where it was swept away by the currents.

I checked in with all the ship scientists. The 3 vertical casts went fine overnight. Unfortunately the waves and swells throughout the night had continuously hit the container lab's A/C unit causing it to short out. In addition to this the shortage caused some problems with the underway pump. So by 9:00 AM the underway pump was useless and not collecting any useable data.  This all seemed relatively manageable, but based on the inability to collect data during the last 3 days due to weather we all were very disappointed. When we finally hit Venice, we found a place to deploy the vertical cast in ~20 meters of water. Our first data collecting point for the day.  Yippy. This was the one bright spot during the day. In the midst of this slow moving river trip I was running around making phone calls to homebase and then relaying info to the captain. We have a scheduled modification to the ship in Port Fouchon, where it will be outfitted with an A frame and additional equipment, namely a CTD sensor. The addition of the CTD will also require additional ship personnel. Currently the Ryan Chouest is able to fit 26 people, we currently have 23. After the CTD is added we will require an additional 3 personnel and possibly 2 more.

So the captain and I had many discussions trying to figure out how we could figure out the boat capacity and sleeping arrangements. Not only that but I made calls to different contractors arranging people to come onto the boat and work on various issue such as sticky doors, shorted air compressors, etc. while the major contruction was taking place. Taking care of a ship in addition to pilotting the ship is a logistical nightmare. By 6:00 PM the captain and I had everything all worked and we were able to relax. All I can say is I have a new found respect to everyone who works on a ship. There are some many things that need to be taken care of, I know have a really solid idea of where the saying 'he runs a tight ship' comes from and it has a whole new meaning to me. In addition to 'everything is in ship shape'. The AB seamen all have their specific roles and jobs that they complete deligently everyday. The OB also follow a strict schedule. The cooks make meals for each crew shift. Breakfast at 5:30-6:30 AM, Lunch 11:30-12:30 PM, Dinner 5:30-6:30 PM, and then dinner for the night shift at 12:00-1:00 AM. So the two cooks are cleaning and cooking non-stop and the galley is never in disarray. They also do things like make banana bread from overripening bananas in between. The engineers are also impressive, constantly working in the engine room fixing anything that might arise or anything that may arise on the ship. This way of life is very intriguing, it has a stillness that drifts above the unlying chaos of the ship. Man constantly harnessing a floating beast that is being pulled and tugged upon by both the air and the sea. 

The long awaited second journey begins

I did not write anything yesterday because I was busy running around talking to Captain Bill, my bosses onshore, Coast Guard, and the ship scientists trying to determine when we should head back to the gulf for our second planned trip. As I mentioned before, the weather has been relatively rough. A low pressure in the gulf just south of Mobile Bay had generated a fair amount of storms. These storms were causing combined waves of 6-9 with the occassional 11 feet surges and winds were measured at 18-24 knots with gusts up to 30.

So a lot of discussion insued about the reliability of the instrumentation, the safety of deploying the vertical cast equipment, the ability to remove the noise from the echosounder data. Finally we decided to stay in port another night. In the meantime, the Captain and I plotted a course from Theodore to the south pass of the Mississippi delta, up to Venice, Louisiana, and back again to Port Fouchon. So it may end up that we have a little Mark Twain adventure, several hours of life on the mississippi. We are hoping that we can tow the array up river collecting water quality data. This will provide a better understand of the river's influence into the gulf. It is already well documented that the discharge of the Mississippi has created a growing 'deadzone' at the mouth of birdfoot delta and into the gulf for several years.

For the rest of the time my officemate, Curt, and I have been eating numberous amounts of starburst candies and hershey miniatures while just surfing the web and talking. So I thought I would provide a few pictures of the inside of the ship and some of the people on it.

Bunks

Officemate, Curt

Messages from home

Before I left home for this seafaring adventure I had been working on some curtains for the kitchen. I got these two great pictures on my phone. Matt had found a curtain rod. So now my kitchen has some mushroom curtains.  I do think they need some pressing and possible adjustments to look a little better, but not too shabby.

Science log 3- out to sea and back

We arrived at the deployment site at 5:30 AM. All hands we on deck and by 6:30 the wave glider was in the water and quickly moved on its eastward path. Throughout the course of the day the glider's speed was registered at 2.1 to 3.0 knots. This surprised just about everyone on-board the ship. The average, or expected speed, was between 1 to 2 knots.

So the deployment went smoothly. The retrieval, on the other hand did not. You may be asking, but why? Well the gulf is always full of surprises in weather, especially in the fall. So when we left the dock it was kinda overcast and then for the whole day yesterday it rained, either a drizzle or a deluge. The storm caused 4-8 foot swells and a very fluid boat, or what everyone called 'the rockin' ryan'. Luckily I took everyone's advice and started taking dramamine 2 days before deployment. I got kinda queasy at one time, basically the first time I tried sitting down on my computer to write the daily report. I took a video of the 'box' I call the office, but I can't seem to get my computer to play it. Maybe I can add it through another computer. The portable office is situated on the back deck very close to the deck edge. We had wave crashing into our window every 10 or so minutes and our chairs were rolling around, even with duck tape on them.

The day seemed to be going pretty slowly. Especially since I woke up at 5:30 and the peak excitement of the day happened at 6:30 am. However, at 4:00 pm, the CSIRO scientists came knocking at my office to inform me that the winch they used to deploy the vertical cast equipment had broken, or more specifically, there was a crack in the shaft coupling sleeve of the sprocket. Immediately I had to call the manufacturer and relay that we needed a replacement sprocket for us at port on Saturday. This call required a photograph due to my inability to properly describe all things mechanical. Based on the winch being out of commission we made a decision to go ahead and head back to port. On our way back in we decided to try to find the Wave glider and retrieve it. Finding that little sucker was tricky, especially since it had gotten dark and the storm had escalated (along with the size of the waves). So the wild goose chase continued and when we finally found it it took 2 hours to catch the glider and get it onto the deck. It was almost like the little robot had a mind of its own, always tacking when we got close to it. I felt like I was in a wild adventure with big seas, rain, and a pitching boat- a regular most dangerous catch. After the excitement of getting the wave glider on-board it was almost 9:30 pm. I had a few hours before my shift was up and we headed in to Theodore. The boat continued to pitch all night and I slept in till 9:00!