I’m back from a tour down under on the University of Washington ship Thomas G. Thompson. I went to Tasmania and New Zealand.  Both are amazing places.  Over the next few weeks I’ll write up my adventures.

My next tour will start at the end of May.  I’ll be joining the Knorr in San Diego to do some cruises around Alaska and Hawaii.

I hope you enjoy reading the posts.

• Hobart
• Transit to New Zealand
• Port Stop in Lyttelton
• New Zealand Seismology
• Port Stop in Lyttelton II: Trains & Rugby
• University of Washington Student Cruise

The University of Washington has a fantastic undergraduate oceanography program.  One of its highlights is the class “Ocean 444″, a class in which students plan and conduct an entire research cruise.

The goal of this year’s Ocean 444 cruise was to study the Kermadec Arc, a line of underwater volcanoes North of New Zealand.

For this post I’m going to punt on doing on my rendition of the cruise because the students already created a great blog that covers everything:

https://courses.washington.edu/ocean444/2009/blog

It’s got the science of undersea volcanoes, hot-pink plankton, and undercover shots from talk-like-a-pirate day.  Check it out!

You can see my photos from the cruise here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/adorsk/sets/72157618716848682/show/

Train Ride to the West Coast

I took advantage of the long port stop and went to the West coast with my shipmates IG and MC.  We went to the town of Greymouth on the West Coast of the South island via the TranzAlpine, a train that cuts through the New Zealand alps.

The train left Christchurch and went into the broad plains surrounding the city.  The air was cool and the sky overcast.  Sheep and cows dotted the plains.  They looked like packing peanuts that had been scattered over the landscape. From the train’s open-air observation car I watched the approaching mountains.

IG and the TranzAlpine

IG & MC on the train

the Canterbury plains outside of Christchurch

Soon the train entered the mountains, winding between the ashy peaks, passing over high viaducts, and clattering through tunnels.  As the train neared Arthur’s Pass in the middle of the mountains the temperature dropped significantly and there was a persistent needling rain. It made the the air look like it was filled with television static.

the train heads into the mountains

The rain seemed to swell the mountains to bursting.  I saw waterfalls spraying out of the mountainsides as if the mountains had sprung leaks.  The waterfalls flowed into blue-grey rivers, and eventually into the forests and seas of the West coast.

rivers in the mountains

As the train descended down the other side of the mountains the sun came out.  The scenery had changed from alpine shrubs to tropical forest.  There were palm trees and giant ferns.  The train skirted along the Grey river (which looked more brown than grey) and arrived in Greymouth.

the train near the Grey river

In Greymouth we met up with tour guide S who took us to a nearby canyon to hunt for glow worms.  A glow worm is a species of fly whose larvae glow in they dark.  Glow worms especially like moist caves near rivers.

S took us down to the bottom of the canyon.  The canyon walls were sheer, high, and festooned with ferns.  A brown river flowed along the base of the walls. S set us up with wet suits, helmets, and inner tubes, and then set us floating down a river.

It was great fun.  The river zipped us around, pulling us through waterfalls and bumping us into the canyon walls.

me, IG, and MC floating down the river

We reached a cave at the bottom of the river and floated in.  There was only dim light from the cave’s entrance and the sound of water dripping.  And glow worms above. In the darkness they looked like stars.  There is a Borges story called ‘The Aleph’ which describes certain places that let people see the entire universe.  That cave was like an Aleph; it seemed to contain an entire galaxy in its ceiling.

floating into the glow worm cave

IG, MC, and I stayed the night in Greymouth and caught a bus back to Christchurch the next morning.

Rugby

The remaining days in port were relatively uneventful, with the exception of a rugby match between the Canterbury Crusaders and the Hurricanes at a nearby stadium.  A bunch of us from the ship went to check it out.

What a spectacle!  I could tell we were in for a show even before the game started.  At midfield there was a giant sword surrounded by torches.  A few minutes before the official game time medieval choral music thundered out of the stadium speakers.  The torches around the sword started to belch fire, and a team of fully-armored knights charged onto the field on black stallions.  When the rugby teams charged onto the field a few minutes later it seemed like an anticlimax.

But there was still more to come.  As the starting lineups formed at midfield I noticed a coast guard helicopter flying close the stadium…and closer.  The helicopter landed in the middle of the field and out popped a small boy who carried the game ball to the referee. Kiwis like their rugby with style.

And then the game started.  I couldn’t make any sense of it.  There was some running, some punting, and quite a bit of mashing.  I could only tell when someone was about to score when guys in the row behind me started shouting ‘GO!, GO!, GO!’ at peak volume.

Eventually I figured out that the Crusaders were losing.  My shipmates and I left just before the game ended, to the jeers of the local fans.  In New Zealand rugby is a serious affair.

Back Out to Sea Again

During the remaining days in port I got ready for the upcoming cruise.  Soon the next science party had arrived and the ship was ready to go.

You can see my photos from the port stop here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/adorsk/sets/72157618715992864/show/

First some science.  Why should anyone care about the seismology of New Zealand?  Because it can tell us how the Earth works.  It can help us answer questions like: What happens when two continents run into each other?  Do they make Earthquakes happen?  Do they make certain minerals form?  Seismic data can help geologists answer these questions.  Eventually these answers can help us design warning systems for earthquakes and volcanoes, and locate natural resources.  The fruits of basic research.

New Zealand is an excellent place to study seismology.    It is a geologist’s dream.  It sits atop the junction of the Australian and Pacific plates and consequently is chock full of geological activity.  There are already heaps of data on it.

I should say rather that there are heaps of data on the parts of New Zealand above water.  Unfortunately not much is known about the underwater parts.  That’s why chief scientist JC and his science party were aboard the Thompson.

The Science Party

JC was a geologist from WHOI, originally from Ireland.  He had a rich Irish brogue that carried throughout the computer lab, especially when he was singing.

With JC were geologists PM and AS from the University of Colorado, and graduate student DC.

DT was a middle-school teacher from Colorado who was documenting the cruise for students back on land.  You can see his cruise blog here: http://cires.colorado.edu/science/features/quakecruise/ . Check it out!  Not only does it have haikus, but it has a lot of great things about life on the Thompson.

MC was a marine technician from the Coast Guard who was along as an observer to study deployments.

MG, PG, and EA were three technicians from the Scripps institute of Oceanography.  They were in charge of deploying and maintaining the sensors.

OBSs

Which leads me to the sensors themselves.  The sensors we used were called OBS’s (ocean bottom seismometer).  Their job was to detect jiggling on the seafloor.

This was not an easy job.  An OBS had to detect a range of vibrations, sometimes as small as a millimeter, sometimes as large as a several meters. It also had to be durable.  It would be dropped off a ship, sink down thousands of kilometers to the seafloor, spend a year at the bottom of the ocean, float back to the surface on command, and then be hooked back onto the ship.  An OBS had to be one tough SOB.

The major oceanographic institutions have been designing various models of OBS’s.  On this cruise we used the Scripps ‘L-CHEAPO’ model (Low-Cost Hardware for Earth Applications &  Physical Oceanography).  The L-CHEAPO is quite a clever piece of engineering.

DT has a whole blog post devoted to how it works:

http://cires.colorado.edu/science/features/quakecruise/?paged=14

During this cruise we would deploy 32 of them on either side of New Zealand.

OBSs on the stern of the Thompson

OBS close-up

The Cruise

The cruise started out with a transit around the Southern end of the South Island.  We were fortunate to have good weather at the start.  The sea wasn’t too rough and we could even see the mountains of New Zealand’s Southern Alps.  It looked like someone had dropped chunks of Switzerland in the middle of the ocean.

the Southern alps of New Zealand

Marine life was abundant.  Albatrosses wheeled around and around.  Dolphins came by the ship a few times.  Some people even saw penguins swimming past as we rounded the tip of the island.

dolphins off the bow of the Thompson

After a couple days we reached the site of our first deployment in the deep water West of New Zealand.

Deploying an OBS

OBSs were deployed with great care.  The Scripps guys would wheel the next OBS into the ship’s hangar and check out its electronics.  Then they would gently lower it over the side, pull a release, and let it drop to the seafloor.

EA wheels in an OBS

the Scripps guys gently lower the OBS over the rail...

...and then yank the release

We would track it from the ship using acoustic pings.  When it finally touched down we would get a fix on its position by running a survey around it.

JC pings a descending OBS from the lab

And that’s an OBS deployment!  Repeat 32 times.

Our deployments on the the West side went without incident.  There were a few rougher days but nothing too problematic.  Sometimes we were in sight of Mt. Cook, New Zealand’s highest mountain.  When I first saw it I thought it was just a very high cloud.  All I could see was its snowcap poking out of a cloud bank.  Only when the clouds cleared out did I realize there was entire mountain underneath.

The cruise developed a rhythm.  Normally we deployed three our four OBSs per day, and then did mapping at night before steaming to the next station.

When there was free time between stations people worked in the computer lab, or sat outside on deck.  DT did some fishing for fish with old ham.  Fierce ping-pong games went in the main lab.

DT goes fishing

bait

ping-pong in the main lab

We finished our deployments on the West side and then transited to the East side through the Cook Strait between the islands of New Zealand.

To the East

We started through the straits in the morning.  At sunrise we passed oil rigs and mountains.  At sunset we went past Wellington, the capitol city on the North Island.

oil rig in the Cook Strait

lighthouse in the Cook Strait

sunset near Wellington

We had a few more deployments to do on the East side.  The weather got a bit rougher, but still the Scripps guys handled it with no problems.

When we finished with the deployments we headed back towards Christchurch and did some mapping near the coast to the South.

And then we were done!  All the OBSs were on the seabed feeling for tremors.  JC and his crew would return in a year to pick them up.  But for now we headed back to Lyttelton to offload and prepare for the next cruise.

back to Lyttelton

You can check out all of my photos from this cruise here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/adorsk/sets/72157618386386433/show/

Lyttelton Port & Town

It was cold and rainy.  As I waited for the ship to clear Customs I surveyed the hills that surrounded the harbor.  They were high and shrubby.  I had to crane my neck to see the tops.  The town of Lyttelton covered the lower half of the nearest hill.  It looked like the harbor had sloshed over and left a residue of houses and streetlamps, still wet and shivering.

Here is what the port looked like in better weather:

the port at Lyttelton on a sunny day

The port was filled with logs. Did Lyttelton have plans for a cabin of gargantuan proportions? No, just commerce. A steady stream of trucks and trains brought the logs in heaps from the South island forests. Cranes loaded them onto ships bound for the Pacific rim.

loading logs in Lyttelton

After the ship cleared customs I walked into town. It was small but pleasant. It had the standard New Zealand civic institutions (fish-n-chips shop, bank, pub) but there were also some specialties: a timeball museum overlooked harbor and still dropped its ball every day at noon. A historical museum described the history of Lyttleton and maintained a tiny steam tug that puffed around the harbor. A few cafes and restaurants lined the main streets, most notably the Volcano cafe & Lava bar.

the volcano cafe (picture from the volcano cafe website, http://www.volcano.co.nz/)

I went into one of the cafes to get a glass of orange juice. After a cruise nothing tastes better than fresh fruit and its immediate derivatives. I think the tongue gets bored at sea and starts to taste in black and white.  A fresh orange is like a splash of color.

If the juice was color for the mouth, then the accent of the girl behind the cafe counter was color for the ears.  I had never heard a Kiwi accent in person.  She said “Hi, what can I get for you?“, but I heard:

“Hoyyyih, whut kun oih git fur yooowih?”

It took me a second to decipher.  Eventually I would find the kiwi accent to be mostly comprehensible to my American ears.  When I compare it to American English it seems to have more of a British cadence, slower, more round-about. Sometimes it switches vowels around, so that ‘pen’ becomes ‘pin’ and vice versa. And it seems to add and extend vowel sounds. ‘You’ becomes ‘yooowih’. To me it sounds bluff and friendly, as if the entire country was at a barbeque party.   I found it endlessly fascinating.

I savored my juice and caught a bus to Christchurch. The bus ride itself was a treat. It went through a tunnel and then gradually wound its way through the striking hills of new Zealand into the city.

Christchurch

Christchurch was a charming city.  The rain was letting up and I walked around town. A small river, the Avon, meandered through the center of the city. Punting boats carried tourists under stone bridges.  Cafes and restaurants lined the banks.  I walked along the river past trees and gardens just enjoying the feel of a long walk.

Christchurch gardens

punting on the Avon

a street along the Avon river in Christchurch

The heart of the city was a few blocks from the river, a large square dominated by a cathedral.

Christchurch Cathedral

People milled around through market stalls and statues, they got bratwursts and chinese food from street vendors. And they watched the buskers.

The Buskers

Christchurch was hosting a buskers festival. The world’s top street performers had setup around the city and were busy swallowing swords, juggling fire, and exhibiting other eccentricities. Among the acts I saw were Vincent the percussive juggler from Montreal, Lotto the clown-magician from Japan who could transmogrify anything with a Pringles can, and an American who made sandwiches with his feet.

the International Buskers festival in Christchurch

Vincent, percussive juggler

Lotto the clown with the magic Pringles can

not a finger sandwich, but a foot sandwich

My favorite act was ‘The Pitts’, a pair of Australian acrobats who posed as Cessil and Sandy Pitt, a mutually antagonistic bespectacled brother and sister duo. (Sandy: “Meet my brother, Cess Pit”) They were dry, quirky, and oddly engrossing. Cessil managed to tie Sandy in a knot, knock her unconscious, and then juggle his own foot. They portrayed incompetence, but in reality were excellent acrobats and jugglers. At one point Sandy stood on Cessil’s shoulders as they prepared to juggle a hammer, a toilet brush, and a stuffed lizard. Cessil was shaking frenetically.

Sandy: “Cess! what are you doing!”
Cessil (through gritted teeth): “Trying to make it look difficult!”

Which leads me to the Busker’s formula. After seeing a succession of top-quality street acts I noticed that there seemed to be a common formula:

1. As you setup before your act, leave conspicuous equipment out for the audience to see. Large knives, axes, or fire torches are good candidates.

2. Start with a moderately good trick to warm-up the crowd and get them applauding. The applause will attract more people. Balancing on one arm at the top of a rickety tower seems to work well.

3. Once you’ve got everyone’s attention, tell them what you are going to do, including ‘The Big Trick’. Make sure that you make it sound like you might not be able to do The Big Trick. “I’m going to do some juggling on this high-wire, and if the wind isn’t too strong at the end I’m going to try to juggle flaming torches on one foot.”

4. Do a few tricks, gradually increasing the perceived difficulty. Juggle knives. Then stand on a highwire. Then juggle the knives on the highwire. This is a good time to involve the audience. Get them to help you out by tossing knives to you, or by helping you onto the wire.

5. Finally, do The Big Trick. But this is important: do it reluctantly. “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do this today, the wind is pretty stiff…I’ve never tried it in this kind of wind. But you’ve been a good crowd, let’s give it a shot”. Start the trick but then back off. Do this again.  Of course this is all show. You’ve practiced it thousands of times, you could do this trick with your eyes closed. But don’t let the audience know that.  Make it look difficult.  Start the trick again, but this time actually do it. The audience will go crazy.

6. Pass the hat and rake in a couple hundred.

The key is to make things look difficult even if you can do them perfectly well. The potential for failure and casualties is what seems to hook an audience. Juggling knives flawlessly is impressive but only temporarily interesting. Juggling knives while staggering around and narrowly avoiding mutilation is perpetually engrossing.

I walked around the city some more catching various acts around the town and taking in the city before I headed back to the ship. Christchurch had become one of my favorite port stops.

Back to the Ship

During the remaining days in port I got ready for the next cruise. The sky cleared and the weather was good. The science party arrived and started to setup. The crew loaded their gear, and also the stores for the ship. A brief note: learn from NASA and always check units. It turned out the orders for the food stores had been fulfilled in kilograms, not pounds. So we had about double of everything.

too many tomatoes

the oncoming science party

Finally everything was ready. The science party had their gear loaded and we were ready to go. We pulled out on another gray Lyttelton morning and went back to sea.

leaving Lyttelton

You can see more of my Lyttelton and New Zealand pictures here:

Lyttelton/New Zealand photos

Usually transits are quiet and regular. The ship follows a direct course at a steady speed. But sometimes things happen along the way that shake things up.

Adjustments

My transit began with minor adjustments, mostly from getting back to sea after being a shore for a month. The first few days there waves of 5-10 feet. Relatively speaking these were not large seas. They were just big enough to make the Thompson roll slightly. And to trip me up. The Thompson rolled and I bumped into walls. I had find my sea legs again.

Then there was my schedule. I had become nocturnal. I, C.S. (another tech), and R.H. (the lead tech) divided the day into two 12-hour shifts. I took the night shift from 22:00 to 10:00. It took me a few days to adjust as I tried to catch up on sleep.

The acoustics of my room didn’t help. My room sounded like an air force bombing range. Each time the ship encountered a wave there was a whooshing rumble, like the afterburner of a fighter jet. Then there would be a descending whistle, followed by a tremendous shaking crash as the ship rammed into the base of the next wave. The whole thing sounded something like “GrrrrrrrwwwooOOOSSSHHHH…SSSSSSHHLLLEWWWWW-**CHLMOMBBBSSSSSHHSRSC!!**”.

But I got used to it. This is something about going to sea that always amazes me: people can adapt to almost anything. I forgot about the rolling of the ship, I got used to having lunch at 1:30 in the morning, I learned to sleep through tactical air strikes. I adjusted.

The Thompson was starting to feel like a home. At work I was busy installing computers, developing a mental map of the Thompson’s systems. In my off-time I went up to the bow to play guitar or listen to NPR podcasts. I played around with my camera and started to see the details of the ship.

the Thompson from the stern

paint

letter on the Thompson's small boat

The sea was becoming familiar as well. The first few days of the transit had been consistent. Skies were mostly sunny with occasional ragged patches of clouds. The seas had been moderate. There were albatrosses and something I called ‘The Oreo Bird’ because of its black and white wings. The birds wheeled around the ship in the chilly Tasman breeze.

oreo birds

I reserve a certain awe for the albatrosses. They were fascinating to watch. From a distance they looked like a normal seagull. But then they would glide towards the ship and get bigger…and bigger. Too big, as if they followed different laws of perspective. These were expansive birds.

the albatross

They were beautiful to watch fly. Sometimes they followed the contours of the waves. Other times they would slingshot back and forth behind the ship. They would coast up into the wind, make a long accelerating turn, and then whip back down as if shot from a cannon. They could glide forever. I watched them sometimes when they flew away from the ship. They would be out of sight before I ever saw a flap. I imagine that to be an albatross is to see wind, just as you or I would see a color or hear a sound. Remarkable birds.

Life inside the ship was no less fascinating. There are some amazing people who go to sea.

For example, there was RR the oiler who had traveled around Asia, who made ships-in-bottles, and could fix anything. Or the F the AB who told me about the night the ship was haunted by the ghost of a German sailor. Or T the cook who spoke Welsh and told raunchy jokes in her thick Scottish accent. If I pause to think of the sheer amount of story and skill on a single ship, it staggers me.

I was getting used to the Thompson, finding its rhythm and my own. The ship was making steady Eastern headway. I was busy putting in new computers. I felt like I had adjusted. And then the shake-up came.

The Shake-Up

On the fourth night of the transit the Thompson went into a gale. We knew it was coming but it still shook us up.

To me rough weather seems to appear suddenly. One minute things seem all right. If there is any weather I don’t notice it. But then it changes in a moment. A large roll makes me stumble, or my chair slides, or the door of a computer rack bangs open. With a single gesture the weather demands attention. It snaps its fingers and announces “I’m here!”. And then I realize that the weather has arrived.

The gale announced its arrival to me by knocking over a pencil holder. As I picked up rolling pens and pencils I suddenly heard the wind whistling outside, I felt it when a wave shook the ship. “It’s here”, I thought. I got ready for a long night.

There were sustained winds of 55 knots, with gusts up to 70. The mates on the bridge said waves were 30-40 feet. We had given up any pretensions of forward progress. We cut our engines back and prepared to ride it out.

The ship had become a laboratory for distraction. Professional tormentors, take note, straight from the ocean, here is how to inhibit all thought and focus:

Roughly every 7 minutes, do one of the following:

*tip over a chair loudly
*trip someone
*make cymbal crashing sounds (this one can be done every 30 seconds)
*make tables rattle

I got cranky. On some level I knew this was illogical. What good does it do to be angry at the sea? But I was not thinking logically that night. I wrote very little code.

Fortunately the gale only lasted for that night. By the morning the wind had died down and the sun returned. Seas were still a moderate 5-10 feet, but they seemed like ripples after the previous night.

It turned out that the storm delayed us by a day. This was not great, but it was not terrible. Things could have been worse.

We were fortunate to get calm weather for the rest of the transit. We steamed ahead for an uneventful two days and arrived just outside of Lyttleton harbor on the morning of the 27th.

Arriving at Lyttleton

New Zealand was an extreme place in many respects. This struck me as the Thompson approached Lyttleton. The clouds were extremely dark. The wind was extremely cold. The waves were extremely choppy.

approaching Lyttleton under dark skies

But it was also extremely beautiful, and different. Lyttleton lay at the end of a long glacial fiord through ashy hills. The walls of the fiord were steep and crannied. Trees were sparse and patchy. The clouds hid everything beyond the hills.

a light near Lyttleton

A pilot boat led us into the harbor. The clouds were shifting and we could see more and more of the hills. Soon we were in sight of the harbor, and then we were at the dock.

the Lyttleton pilot boat

the clouds shift

the end of the fiord

Lyttleton in sight

chief mate J throws out a docking line

Our transit was complete.

You can see all of my transit pictures here:
Tasman Sea Transit Pictures

In mid-January I went to Australia to join the the the University of Washington’s research ship, the Thomas G. Thompson.  Or at least I think I went to Australia.  I may have actually been sucked into an alternate universe.  Thus the E.E. Cummings line that titles this post.

I’ve heard that alternate universes are supposed to be very similar to our own but with minor differences.  Big things like the law of gravity are usually the same.  But then you find out that everyone is left-handed, or that bananas are purple.  That sort of thing.  That’s why it’s so hard to distinguish between an alternate universe and another developed Western nation.  In both cases everything seems mostly the same, but with a subtle twist.

There are some reasons to think that I did go to another world.  Time travel was involved.  At some time during my flight across the Pacific I jumped from the late evening of January 14th to the early afternoon of January 15th.  The international dateline has erased the morning of January 15th from my life.

The seasons had shifted as well.  I had left Boston in deep winter, snow and ice piled high.  When I arrived at the Sydney airport it was suddenly the middle of summer.  People were strolling through the terminals in flip-flops and shorts.

Yet things were mostly the same.  There were cellphones and newspapers.  There was electricity and running water.  Most people spoke English.  They even dropped their ‘R’s, like in Boston.

But there were those subtle twists.  People spoke with a British cadence.  Airport golf carts drove on the left.  The airport televisions had rugby scores rather than football scores.

I continued on to Hobart (the ticket agent: ‘Going on to Ho-bat, mate?’) where I would meet the ship.  I arrived on a Friday, two days before I would join the ship.

Hobart: a Hell of a Nice Universe

If I really I was in another universe then it turned out to be a hell of a nice one after all.  Hobart is in the Southeastern part of Tasmania, nestled between tall forested hills and a finger of the Tasman sea that juts inland.  In past days it had been a whaling and shipping port.  It has since transformed into a small but thriving city filled with waterfront restaurants, quirky shops, and energy.  Less Moby Dick, more Moby the sound artist.

I agree

A typically witty Hobart shop

Hobart from the waterfront

A park in central Hobart

When I was there it felt like late Springtime in New England.  The air was mild and breezy and the city was in full vegetable eruption.  Clouds peeled off the mountains in the morning sunrise.

I walked around town, going through the gardens, walking along the waterfront.  I got the sense that Tasmanians took pride in their city.  It was clean and well-kept.  The stores and restaurants were locally owned.  There were advertisments for local bands and community meetings, and even  ruined pianos.

Hobart wants your ruined pianos

To market, to market

On Saturday there was the Salamanca market.  Salamanca is a neighborhood of what used to be shipping warehouses.  These days the warehouses hold restaurants and art galleries.  Limestone buildings stretch out along the waterfront, with trees, fountains, and parks lining the main avenue.

The market was easily the best street market I have been to in any universe.  The entire Salamanca strip had turned into a swirling river of people channeled by lines of market stalls.  The crowds meandered under rainbow-colored windsocks and flags.  The aroma of spiced lamb wafted out from Kebab stands.  There were musicians at every corner.  Artists did portraits, vendors hawked their crafts.

setting up for the market in the morning

A very young entrepreneur

Salamanca market

portraits at Salamanca market

music at the market

Salamanca market

The diversity and quality of goods amazed me.  There were fresh-picked cherries, carved wooden chess sets, and mobiles made of tea kettles.  There were vegetables and hats and soda-can sculptures.  There were licorice rolls and wool slippers.  What was not there were ‘made in China’ stickers or shoddy plastic toys.  Everything had been made locally.

hats at the market

hand-made candles, my personal favorite thing at the market

bring breakfast back to life with...

Perhaps this wasn’t an alternate universe. Perhaps I was actually entering the real universe for the first time.  The world I left behind seemed a sham by comparison, filled with cheap plastic shapes.  Maybe this was the real world, a place where people made things and appreciated them.  I’m still not sure.  Many places seem dull now compared to the Salamanca market.

After the market I walked through the parks.  There were jugglers on the lawns, and even a traveling Leonardo Da Vinci exhibit with working models made from his drawings.  It was a very good time to be in Hobart.

traveling Da Vinci exhibit in Hobart

Shipping Out

I went to meet the ship the next day .  The Thompson is a large research ship (though still small by shipping standards), a touch under 300 feet long.  Most things were similar to other research ships I had been on.  Same sort of equipment.  Same fluorescent lab lights, same weathered wooden lab tables.  Though with slightly different layouts, as if someone had shuffled all your furniture around.  Subtle twists.

the Thompson in Hobart

I got ready to leave over the remaining days in port.  In the early mornings I walked through the city gardens and along the water.  During the days I met the Thompson’s crew and learned about the ship’s systems.  In the evenings I went to nearby Prince’s park and played guitar.

morning dew on a Hobart garden

Rowing on the Hobart harbor

And then it was time to go.  We left in the afternoon just before the sun went behind the mountains.  We passed through a regatta, wend under the Tasman bridge, and dropped off the harbor pilot.  in a few hours we were back out sea, on our way East to another universe next door.

Chief mate J watches for traffic under the Tasman bridge

The pilot departs. G'day mate.

Leaving Hobart

I have some more Hobart photos here if you want to see more:

Hobart Photos

1. Suez Canal
2. Mediterranean Transit
3. The Rock: Gibraltar
4. Atlantic Transit
5. U.S. Virgin Islands
6. Towing the Line: USVI to Bermuda
7. Bermuda
8. BATS
9. We’re Back!  Return to WHOI

*The Oceanus did some cruises in the Middle East before the Suez Canal posting, but I don’t have links to my posts about that time here anymore.

And just in time.  I’m off to Australia and New Zealand on January 14th.  I’ll be doing some relief tech work on the University of Washington’s ship Tommy Thompson.  Should be an interesting set of trips.  Check back in a month or so to see how it goes.

We expected to get a good walloping on our way back. Our first day out wasn’t bad, just gray and chilly. But things picked up later.

The North Atlantic in winter

On the second night we drove right into a storm. I woke up in the middle of the night when a particularly big wave had rattled the ship. I couldn’t fall back asleep and went up to the bridge.

It was a frightful sight. The sea was foaming and churning. Every wave that crashed over the bow sent clattering sheets of water into the bridge windshield. It was like an army of angry white ghosts was trying to claw its way inside.

The third day of the transit was similarly rough. We rolled back and forth the whole way. It seemed like everyone was engaged in a marathon game of freeze-tag; with every roll we would have to stop and regain our balance.

We arrived at WHOI on the morning of the 21st, a Sunday. A chilling sleet was blowing through the Vineyard sound. But we could see the WHOI dock ahead! Friends, family, and the WHOI regulars were there to greet us.

The dock!

Captain DM guides the ship to the dock

The gangway comes down

It was not an easy docking. Hands froze quickly in the cold sleet and strong wind blew the ship around. But the crew and folks on shore got us in. We lowered the gangway. We were back!

Post-Trip Musings

Over the next few days I packed up my gear and thought about the trip. I really had been very lucky. How else could I have traveled to Saudi Arabia, gone through the Suez canal, hiked the U.S. Virgin Islands, and scootered around Bermuda? How else could I have met amazing scientists and crew mates? There had been some of those stormy, nasty days when I asked myself  ‘what was I thinking’. But the plusses most certainly outweighed the minuses.

I also learned that I do wear down at sea. My whole body felt sore. I think it came from gradual accumulation. Bumpy nights, few chances to take a long walk. And from going to work for just about every day during the last 5 months months.

I also appreciated being back home. The U.S. has many problems but it also has a a lot of great things.  Basic freedoms, paved streets, reasonable laws, trust.  I think I appreciate these things much more after being in places like Saudi Arabia or the Suez canal.

Leaving

The winter storm blew away and the next few days were calm.

The Oceanus back at the dock

I left just as the annual WHOI (machine) shop party was in full-swing. The shop guys had decked the rafters with lights and organized catering, even live bands. Pretty much everyone who was still around for the holidays came down to hang out. WHOI is a special place.

Getting ready for the shop party

The shop party in full swing

This cruise was a BATS cruise. Each year top bat manufacturers (baseball, rugby, cricket, etc.) have an industry-wide competition to see who can make the toughest bat. And what better testing ground than the North Atlantic? The companies supply us with an arsenal of bats, which we put through a series of tests. There’s the hatch test (can it batten down a hatch?), the shark test (can it batten down a mako?), and the computer test (can it batten down that !#@$!@#$!@#$ computer that just froze?).

No, not really. BATS stands for Bermuda Atlantic Time Series. Since the late 80′s there have been research ships going out once or twice a month to measure water properties just Southeast of Bermuda. The resulting data set is one of the most interesting data sets in oceanography. It has been used for all sorts of studies from climate change research to plankton growth.

Usually the BATS cruises are conducted by BIOS, the Bermuda Institute for Ocean Sciences. But their ship, the Atlantic Explorer, was in the shipyard. The Oceanus was booked to go out instead.

Everyone in the science party was from BIOS.

The chief scientist was SB, originally from Tasmania. With him were research technicians MT, LJ, BI, and a group of POGO students. POGO stands for Partnership for Observation of the Global Oceans. It’s a program that provides fellowships to scientists and students from developing countries so that they can study at oceanographic institutions in the US and UK. A neat idea. The POGO students were RA from Venezuela, SK from Brazil, LL from Ghana, SK from Pakistan, ND from India, and HS from Tunisia.

BATS on Deck

The weather was fairly nasty for the first few days of the cruise. It was kind of like being a heavy-metal band that had wealthy sponsors: big rollers kept us rocking. We were able to do a few CTDs at the beginning but the rocking was so severe that the CTD wire loosened and short-circuited. I had to make a new connection. After that we had to go slowly and carefully.

RA gets splashed

RA & MT prepare to recover the CTD

RA & LL getting water samples

We also deployed a few flavors of drifters. One drifter was the primary production array, a set of bottles with radioactive chemicals for measuring how much carbon sea critters consumed. The other drifters we deployed were sediment traps, basically floating bottles with filters for collecting floaties in the water. The samples from sediment traps are good for tracking how nutrients and chemicals travel through the ocean.

Chief mate EG watching the winch during a deployment

Preparing a sediment trap

The sediment traps were easy to deploy but hard to recover. A deployment involved simply lowering the traps over the side. Recovery was much trickier, mainly because it was so hard to find the traps. We had approximate positions for them via radio signals, but we still had to visually locate them when we got closer. The top of a trap looked like a small orange lobster buoy, not an easy thing to pick out from a mile away in big seas. It took some sharp eyes and a lot of luck before we were able to get them all.

Recovering a sediment trap

Taking off the bottles

Back to Bermuda

It was a short cruise, only four days, but we were able to get everything done even in the rough weather. We headed back to Bermuda on the 18th. The blue-green harbor at St. George seemed especially placid after being out in big seas. The science party unloaded that morning and we left in the afternoon, homeward bound at last.