Tuesday, August 30, 2005
SSV Corwith Cramer
Tomorrow, we will be leaving to go on the Corwith Cramer for 10 days. We won't actually sail the boat until late morning or early afternoon on Thursday, I guess getting acclimated to the boat until then, but from then until September 10th, we will be sailing around the clock.
You can chart our progress here. If you have a peculiar desire to hear things in your ears instead of looking at them on a screen, you can also call the toll-free number listed on that page to get a recorded message about our location. You will find information about the current coordinates, speed, and compass direction here. That should be just about all the necessary information.
Here is the Corwith Cramer:
You can see a very nice slideshow with 10 excellent photos here.
After we return to land on September 10, I plan to go to Williamstown (we have a three-day vacation before classes start up again).
In response to repeated inquiries -- no, I will not have e-mail. If you have an urgent message for me, I will be at sea. You can call the Williams-Mystic office and they will assist you in any way they can, or perhaps refer you to the SEA offices. But I don't think I have ever received an urgent message in my life, with the possible exception of when Gloria came into health class in ninth grade to tell us that it was snowing and we were getting picked up early, except that in the end we weren't, so it wasn't so urgent after all, and I just missed health class. And I'm not going to miss any sailing for things like that.
We will be going south around Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, across Georges Bank to the edge where there is very deep water (over a kilometer deep), then north until we are perhaps in Canadian waters, and then eventually down to Rockland, ME, where we will take a motorcoach south.
You can chart our progress here. If you have a peculiar desire to hear things in your ears instead of looking at them on a screen, you can also call the toll-free number listed on that page to get a recorded message about our location. You will find information about the current coordinates, speed, and compass direction here. That should be just about all the necessary information.
Here is the Corwith Cramer:
You can see a very nice slideshow with 10 excellent photos here.
After we return to land on September 10, I plan to go to Williamstown (we have a three-day vacation before classes start up again).
In response to repeated inquiries -- no, I will not have e-mail. If you have an urgent message for me, I will be at sea. You can call the Williams-Mystic office and they will assist you in any way they can, or perhaps refer you to the SEA offices. But I don't think I have ever received an urgent message in my life, with the possible exception of when Gloria came into health class in ninth grade to tell us that it was snowing and we were getting picked up early, except that in the end we weren't, so it wasn't so urgent after all, and I just missed health class. And I'm not going to miss any sailing for things like that.
We will be going south around Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, across Georges Bank to the edge where there is very deep water (over a kilometer deep), then north until we are perhaps in Canadian waters, and then eventually down to Rockland, ME, where we will take a motorcoach south.
My house and my room
Here is a clockwise (from above) tour of the downstairs.
Upon entering, you see the stairs and the kitchen.
This is the kitchen. Mary gave us the blender today.
This is the living room. It came with the boats on the walls.
This is the dining room. It came with the maps.
Now we will have a counter-clockwise tour of my room.
This is my desk. You can see my poster of n-gons in the Gauss plane. It is 78.4 degrees in my room (the thermometer is hanging beside the poster). The view is of our back yard and the main parking lot for the seaport museum.
This is my bed and the sum total of everything, except my rubber boots, that I am taking on the two-week offshore field seminar tomorrow. I had to take it without flash (hence the fuzziness) because my bag has a reflective strip.
Each room, and the stairway, has one of these nice stained-glass windows.
This corner needs work. If you have extra posters, please send them along.
Upon entering, you see the stairs and the kitchen.
This is the kitchen. Mary gave us the blender today.
This is the living room. It came with the boats on the walls.
This is the dining room. It came with the maps.
Now we will have a counter-clockwise tour of my room.
This is my desk. You can see my poster of n-gons in the Gauss plane. It is 78.4 degrees in my room (the thermometer is hanging beside the poster). The view is of our back yard and the main parking lot for the seaport museum.
This is my bed and the sum total of everything, except my rubber boots, that I am taking on the two-week offshore field seminar tomorrow. I had to take it without flash (hence the fuzziness) because my bag has a reflective strip.
Each room, and the stairway, has one of these nice stained-glass windows.
This corner needs work. If you have extra posters, please send them along.
More rigging climbing
Now you see just how high I climbed -- not so far, but certainly far enough.
The view from the top, and the woman who taught us how.
The museum from the rigging
Time stamp
So, I fixed the time stamp to put us in Eastern time instead of Pacific time. That will throw off the times of my posts -- subtract three hours, obviously -- but the comment time stamps should be correct now.
Plankton
This morning we did the loop where we had to illegally cross the interstate highway bridge again and pick our way through the poison sumac. Candice is very fond of that loop. And it really was beautiful this morning to look down from the bridge onto the river below. It was very foggy, so the water was completely flat and still.
Our first class (we all have the same classes, all 18 of us, and the same class schedule, except that half the class takes marine ecology and the other half takes oceanography) was Literature of the Sea, taught by a professor from Middlebury. It sounds like it will be quite a good class. It only meets on Mondays, first for a lecture, then we break into two consecutive discussion sessions, so that he ends up teaching three hours and 15 minutes of English and each student gets 2:15.
After a 30-minute break, we had maritime history. First Glenn went through the syllabus, and then we talked about the reading we had done for the class, which was an interesting reading from Harper's magazine about a guy who traveled on lots of 747s carrying cargo. We compared 747 shipping to boat shipping.
We went back to the house and I introduced Hilary to cottage cheese with applesauce, which she kindly said tasted fine. I had gotten a package, which contained both my medicine and my mom's medicine, so I repackaged everything except what was mine and walked to the post office to mail it. I had run a loop the first day I was here that passed the post office, but it was on the way back, so I wasn't really sure where it was, or how far it was. Luckily, it was not so far, and I mailed my package and got back in time for science.
We met at the science place, Craig Cottage, where we first practiced using the microscope by looking at our fingernails. We all decided that our fingernails are really gross looking. Then we learned about nets. The nets we use have 80-micrometer-wide holes in them, which is 0.08 mm. You can't even tell it has holes in it when you look at it, it's so small. So they catch little tiny things. We went down to the dock and Jim Carlton showed us how to drop the net down and shake it out to get lots of organisms. We each did it ourselves to get a sample, and then brought it back to the lab where we filtered out the water so that we could get all of the stuff into one little dish. When it was filtered like that, with the naked eye you could see little translucent specks moving around, and with the microscope, it was really neat. They were all darting around and swimming and bumping into each other.
Ashley made fajitas for dinner, which were really yummy, and I did the dishes. After dinner we had Mallory house over to watch Captains Courageous, the 1938 version in black and white. They had amazing footage of these sailing ships sailing really fast, with waves crashing over the decks. They definitely milked the sentimental parts to make it a tear-jerker, too. I do highly recommend it. The boat they used to film it was apparently the L.A. Dunton, a schooner that Mystic Seaport has now.
Tomorrow we can climb the rigging again. Perhaps I will bring my camera this time. I haven't taken very many pictures so far, but I do plan to bring it on the offshore field seminar and take more pictures then.
Oh, and thanks to Rebecca for pointing out that I had to open up the commenting privileges. The default was that only people with Blogger accounts could comment, and that was silly. I have now opened it up to everyone. Let me know if something isn't working properly.
Our first class (we all have the same classes, all 18 of us, and the same class schedule, except that half the class takes marine ecology and the other half takes oceanography) was Literature of the Sea, taught by a professor from Middlebury. It sounds like it will be quite a good class. It only meets on Mondays, first for a lecture, then we break into two consecutive discussion sessions, so that he ends up teaching three hours and 15 minutes of English and each student gets 2:15.
After a 30-minute break, we had maritime history. First Glenn went through the syllabus, and then we talked about the reading we had done for the class, which was an interesting reading from Harper's magazine about a guy who traveled on lots of 747s carrying cargo. We compared 747 shipping to boat shipping.
We went back to the house and I introduced Hilary to cottage cheese with applesauce, which she kindly said tasted fine. I had gotten a package, which contained both my medicine and my mom's medicine, so I repackaged everything except what was mine and walked to the post office to mail it. I had run a loop the first day I was here that passed the post office, but it was on the way back, so I wasn't really sure where it was, or how far it was. Luckily, it was not so far, and I mailed my package and got back in time for science.
We met at the science place, Craig Cottage, where we first practiced using the microscope by looking at our fingernails. We all decided that our fingernails are really gross looking. Then we learned about nets. The nets we use have 80-micrometer-wide holes in them, which is 0.08 mm. You can't even tell it has holes in it when you look at it, it's so small. So they catch little tiny things. We went down to the dock and Jim Carlton showed us how to drop the net down and shake it out to get lots of organisms. We each did it ourselves to get a sample, and then brought it back to the lab where we filtered out the water so that we could get all of the stuff into one little dish. When it was filtered like that, with the naked eye you could see little translucent specks moving around, and with the microscope, it was really neat. They were all darting around and swimming and bumping into each other.
Ashley made fajitas for dinner, which were really yummy, and I did the dishes. After dinner we had Mallory house over to watch Captains Courageous, the 1938 version in black and white. They had amazing footage of these sailing ships sailing really fast, with waves crashing over the decks. They definitely milked the sentimental parts to make it a tear-jerker, too. I do highly recommend it. The boat they used to film it was apparently the L.A. Dunton, a schooner that Mystic Seaport has now.
Tomorrow we can climb the rigging again. Perhaps I will bring my camera this time. I haven't taken very many pictures so far, but I do plan to bring it on the offshore field seminar and take more pictures then.
Oh, and thanks to Rebecca for pointing out that I had to open up the commenting privileges. The default was that only people with Blogger accounts could comment, and that was silly. I have now opened it up to everyone. Let me know if something isn't working properly.
Sunday, August 28, 2005
Chores
Today we woke up and chopped potatoes and baked them in the oven to make home fries. Carr house was having a potluck brunch, so we brought them over and chatted until everyone got there. It was very impressive; we had our homefries, and muffins, and a baked French toast custard thing, and English muffins, and bacon and sausage, and iced coffee, and orange juice. Wow.
Last night I made a chart of who would do the various chores, such as cleaning the bathroom and making dinner and washing dishes. It was not an excellent chart, but at least it got the idea out there. Today Valerie took the chart to a whole new level and printed out a version for every day of every week we are here, 8 sheets of paper in total, and posted it on the board downstairs. This week I am in charge of trash, recyclables, and compost. Today it was my job to cook (dinner), so we had pasta. This was not such a cop-out thing as it might seem, because it was either that or leftover chicken and rice and we didn't have a vegetable to go with that, or omelets and we had those last night. It was good pasta, because it was angel hair.
This afternoon we went down to the boathouse to take out boats, but again they were all taken, so the two experienced sailors among us (not me) took out this tippy boat that is not so good in gusts, and it was gusty, and Christine and I took out a rowboat. Christine had never rowed before, and there was a lot of wind, so it was not the best conditions to learn to row, but when she absolutely had to row to get out of the way of an approaching 19th-century steamboat, she did. When we got back, I read a book. I also made dinner. And that is about it. Now I'm reading about Hurricane Katrina. We will be going down to New Orleans on a field seminar later in the semester -- if the city is still there, that is. And I hope it is.
Also, I wrote a long thing responding to questions from the first post, which you might otherwise miss, and you can read them here (scroll down).
Last night I made a chart of who would do the various chores, such as cleaning the bathroom and making dinner and washing dishes. It was not an excellent chart, but at least it got the idea out there. Today Valerie took the chart to a whole new level and printed out a version for every day of every week we are here, 8 sheets of paper in total, and posted it on the board downstairs. This week I am in charge of trash, recyclables, and compost. Today it was my job to cook (dinner), so we had pasta. This was not such a cop-out thing as it might seem, because it was either that or leftover chicken and rice and we didn't have a vegetable to go with that, or omelets and we had those last night. It was good pasta, because it was angel hair.
This afternoon we went down to the boathouse to take out boats, but again they were all taken, so the two experienced sailors among us (not me) took out this tippy boat that is not so good in gusts, and it was gusty, and Christine and I took out a rowboat. Christine had never rowed before, and there was a lot of wind, so it was not the best conditions to learn to row, but when she absolutely had to row to get out of the way of an approaching 19th-century steamboat, she did. When we got back, I read a book. I also made dinner. And that is about it. Now I'm reading about Hurricane Katrina. We will be going down to New Orleans on a field seminar later in the semester -- if the city is still there, that is. And I hope it is.
Also, I wrote a long thing responding to questions from the first post, which you might otherwise miss, and you can read them here (scroll down).
Rigging climbing
Now you see what climbing the rigging was. These pictures are couresy of Hilary. In the pictures where two people have on pink shirts and dark blue shorts, I am the one up higher (Valerie is the lower one). You can see in this last picture that there was a difficult part where you had to lean backwards, as I tried to describe in Friday's post.
