I had a great offshore field seminar. My pictures are now on Shutterfly, and I've selected a few to illustrate my narrative as we go.

The whole trip we only had 15 minutes of rain, and it was at 5:00 in the morning, and I wasn't on watch. The whole rest of the time it was sunny. Two of the days there was no wind. Only one of those days we motored; the other day we just sat there and we also went swimming.

Megafauna:

I saw a whale breach. It was a mile or two away, so it was very small, but it did get all the way out of the water and make a splash. We saw many whales surfacing nearer to the boat, but not less than 50 meters or so.

One morning there were about 10 dolphins surfacing in the bow wake. They stayed with the boat for a long time. Then we noticed 10 or 20 more off of the starboard bow. It was neat because since we were above the water, you could see their grey bodies beneath the surface even when they weren't surfacing. Then most of the ones on the starboard side joined the ones in the bow wake, so we had tons of dolphins in the bow wake. There was a little baby dolphin swimming alongside its mother.

One night when we were on watch, there were these phosphorescent fish swimming beneath the surface in the bow wake. It was mid watch -- 2300 to 0300 hours -- so it was pitch dark. This is when we were in the vicinity of Monhegan Island in Maine. The water was pitch dark, and then you'd see all these glowing bodies, a school of 18-inch fish, appear and dart around in a group, and then they'd disappear again. There were probably between 15 and 30 of these big glowing fish that would appear at a time.

We saw a giant leatherback turtle, maybe 1.5 meters in diameter, about 20 feet off of the stern on the port side. It was just floating there. The scientists said it was probably 140 to 150 years old at that age.

We saw ocean sunfish. They look like big white pancakes 2-3 feet in diameter floating just under the surface, with a black dorsal fin. So if it is near the boat, you think it is a pancake because you see the white fish part, and if it is far away and you can't see the fish part, then you think it is a shark.

We saw a really big shark. We saw the dorsal fin on the starboard side maybe 50 feet from the boat, going parallel to the ship and at about the same speed. Then we saw its tail, about 10 feet (no joke) behind its dorsal fin. That was a big shark.

One time we were out on the bowsprit furling the jib or the JT, and our backs were to the port side, and we heard a big splash behind us, and we turned around to see a 20-foot-diameter circle of white crested wave where clearly an animal had just surfaced. The people who had been watching told us it was a shark, and a big one at that. Good thing we had the netting to hold us up! Unfortunately for my story, these sharks were just big, not ferocious. They are filter feeders or something lame like that.

We saw lots of mahi mahi, and actually James, the engineer, put out a fishing line and one of them got on it, and there was much commotion and excitement on the quarterdeck, but then it got itself off. Mahi mahi are iridescent, like neon colored, and they have green, blue, and sort of pink. They are 12-18 inches or so. They swim 5-10 feet below the surface. We did see quite a lot of them.

Seas:

The thing I was most excited about on the trip was that we would be encountering big seas, i.e. where the waves are really big. The thing about being in a big boat is that it takes much bigger seas to seem big. When there were whitecaps, it was no big deal, because the seas at that point were only maybe three feet anyway, and the ship just cut right through them. But one day there were really big swells. I took a picture of them. Actually I took five or six pictures, because when you take pictures of the waves, it's impossible to convey what they actually look like, and so I thought maybe a few pictures would help.

Anyway, I thought this was just about the most exciting thing ever, so I got Valerie to come with me and we went out on the bowsprit netting and crashed up and down as the ship crashed through the swells. If we had been standing on the bow, we would have gotten wet when the bow hit the waves and made a splash, but when you are on the bowsprit then you are actually ahead of the spray so you don't get wet. We were clipped in with our harnesses. The bowsprit is about 10 feet long. When the bow went down, we were maybe 10 feet off the water, and when it went up, were were maybe 30 feet above the water.


When I was not on the bowsprit that morning, I discovered that if you hang on a bar, as though you intend to do a chinup, then when the ship goes over a swell, there is a sort of floating sensation when it crests the wave.

Also.

One day when there was no wind (because there was a high pressure system sitting on top of us -- the barometer got up to 1027 millibars, and that's a lot) we were only 87 nm from Rockland and we had four days to get there, so we were just sitting there, and they let us go swimming. At this point we were obviously in the Gulf of Maine, so the water was only about 70, which is pretty cold (when we were in the Gulf Stream it was more like 85, but we did not get to go swimming then). The neat thing was that we were swimming in about 150 meters of water. I suggested to Candice that I would throw a penny down and she could dive for it. She suggested that I go first.

We jumped off the bowsprit, which is about 5 feet off the water where it is connected to the bow, and about 12 feet off the water at its highest point. (The bowsprit is pretty long, and my figures are estimates.) So that was a pretty high place to jump from, especially when you consider that you jump up, which adds to your altitude. So you are in the air for a long time, and then when you enter the water, you go pretty deep. We had seen a shark (I made a typo and said whale originally, which is wrong) just a few hours before going swimming, and we had only been drifting since then since there was no wind, so we had lookouts in the rigging in case they saw a shark. They saw no sharks.

We also went swimming in the harbor in Rockland, where it was only 59 degrees.

I climbed up the rigging twice, not to the very top of the mast, but to the second platform (of two). The first time, when I went to the higher platform, was after we went swimming, when there was no wind and the sea was completely flat. And I discovered, from high up on the mast, that the sea is, indeed, extremely flat. I made this observation allowed. My classmates agreed with me. We could see a boat on the horizon that you probably couldn't see from the deck. Standing on the deck, your eyes are perhaps 10 feet above sea level. The second platform is about 60-70 feet off the deck (note that when you climb up, you rely only on your own grip, and don't clip in until you get to the top of where you are climbing to) so then your eyes are about, let's say 70 feet off the surface of the water.

You can determine via a simple calculation the distance to the horizon given your distance above the ocean's surface (assuming a perfectly spherical, i.e. "flat," i.e. no significant waves). I have derived this to be as follows:

d = the square root of the following: 4/3 times your height plus one 5280th squared of your height squared.

In this equation, d is in miles and your height is in feet, because those are the most useful units to use. Substituting in 10 and 75, you find that from the deck you can see about 3.65 miles, and from the second platform you can see about 10 miles. Whoopee.

Stars.

At night, we could see lots of stars. There are about 55 navigational stars, which are relatively bright and relatively spread out in the sky, so that people can navigate by them. Our watch officer, Scott, and our captain, Jen, pointed all of them out to us multiple times, as well as a bunch of constellations. When we were on an earlier watch, like evening watch, we could see the big dipper, and then during mid watch Orion would rise and then during dawn watch you could see Orion basically the whole time.

The moon was a new moon when we got on the boat, so there was essentially no moonlight. Once the moon rose right where the sun was setting, and there were two planets there too, so you could see the tiny sliver of the moon and two bright points right on the pink sky. That was pretty neat.

We saw all of the sunrises and sunsets. The sun set at around 7 PM and rose around 7:00 AM. The sun was always bright orange when it set. I am not sure if this is true everywhere or just on the ocean or just when it is nice weather. The sky was not always red, more orange or pink.

We learned to use a sextant. We learned three skill sort of things one afternoon: splicing, knots, and a sextant. I utterly failed at splicing, though what I made does resemble a splice. I did all right with the knots, though I could not remember the whole rabbit coming out of the hole thing for the bowline and thus I had to invent my own way to tie it. But when I used the sextant, I found our position to within 200 yards of our actual position. (They put our sightings into the GPS or something to determine how close we were.)

The nicest watch was dawn watch, because when you got up at 2:30 it was pitch dark, and by the time you handed over the watch at 7:00 the sun had risen and it was totally bright daylight out. Once I took the helm at about 5 AM when it was pitch dark. The helm was a steering wheel, so if you turned it a full rotation, it looked just like it had before you had turned it at all. So there was a little metal indicator to tell you how many turns you had on the wheel. It was a metal hand that pointed to various notches, sort of like a gas gauge. Since it was pitch dark, I had to put my fingers on it to see how many turns I had on the wheel (every turn of the wheel was 5° of turn on the rudder). When I turned over the helm to Rebecca at 6:30, I was telling her how it was useful to put your fingers on the needle of the gauge to see where it was, and then I realized that it was totally bright outside and you could just look at it.

Watch.

The 20 of us who were on watch (18 students plus two others) were divided into three watches: A watch, B watch, C watch. Each watch had a watch officer (the first, second, or third mate) and an assistant scientist (the third, second, or first assistant scientist). I was on B watch, so we had the second of each. The watch schedules rotated ABCAABCABC... etc. The watches were as follows:

0300-0700: Dawn watch
0700-1300: Morning watch
1300-1900: Afternoon watch
1900-2300: Evening watch
2300-0300: Mid watch

So for instance if you had dawn watch, then you could go back to bed after breakfast (and dawn cleanup) and you would't be on watch again until evening watch, and then you could have a sort of normal night's rest after evening watch and then you'd be on watch the whole morning, and then you could go to bed at 8:00 after dinner and you'd be awakened at 2230 to go on mid watch, and then you could go to sleep at 0300 and you would be on watch again in the afternoon, and then you'd have dawn watch so it would be three days later and the cycle would repeat.

If you were going on watch at a mealtime, like at 0700, 1300, or 1900, then you were awakened one hour before you had to go on watch because the meal was served 40 minutes before the watch started. Every meal had two sittings. If there was no meal, like for mid and dawn watch, then you were awakened 30 minutes before watch started. You didn't set an alarm or anything, because that would be loud and it would wake up other people. Rather, someone from the watch that you would be relieving would come to your bunk and wake you up.

So, to answer your question, Rebecca, we did not go on watch alone. There were always either eight or nine people on watch together. On deck with the mate would be three people, in the lab with the scientist would be three people, and the seventh person would be in the galley. On deck we needed one person at the helm (students were at the helm at all times except during the hour or two of class in the afternoon) and at night we needed a lookout. When we needed to set or strike sail, we got the students from the lab because it took a lot of people to haul on the downhaul or the halyard, to ease the sheets, to sweat the lines when we had hauled all we could, this sort of thing. We also had to do hourly boat checks where you walk through and make sure everything is running properly, and hourly logs, both on deck (wind direction, seas, temperature, taffrail log, plot position on chart) and in the lab (water temperature, salinity, barometric pressure, latitude and longitude, direction and magnitude of surface currents). So it was good we had a bunch of people around to do these things.

More later.