Friday, September 30, 2005
Fishing
On Thursday it was a beautiful day for sailing. Unfortunately our student boat wardens had knocked the centerboard off of the Mystic sailboat, so we had to take off the mast and boom and take it over to the boat yard and help them take it out, which took our entire two-hour time slot. That was kind of annoying. It is the boat wardens' job to take the boats around and haul them and such, and they get paid for it; not only do we not get paid for it, but also they take away our sailing time. But they used a forklift with a six-inch horizontal rod which they drove up to the edge of the (deep) water and put it over the boat, and then put two cloth slings over the rod and under the boat, lifted the rod as a forklift does, and lifted the boat out and carried it around entirely by gravity and friction. Then to clean the bottom, they used a high-powered hose (it was attached to a motor) which was really effective.
Unfortunately the rest of that day was spent writing my history paper. It was a really boring topic, and unfortunately I wrote a boring paper to answer it, which was basically because I resented the question and was thus not interested in writing an interesting paper. At least the paper addressed the question, the entire question, and nothing but the question.
Yesterday evening we had a "yay, we're done with work" party. We had people over to bring their perishable food, and we played a fun game called Apples to Apples. Then Rebecca (the one at Williams-Mystic) had this paper summarizing her summer research that she needed edited, so I spent a few hours editing it. It was about how her university can address environmental issues through all sorts of things, like dining services and facilities management, but also through the general curriculum.
It was a short night, because this morning we got up at 5:30 for breakfast at Carr house (carrot-zucchini-chocolate muffins and crepes) at 5:45 before mustering at Labaree at 6:30 for the fishing trip. We got to the place half an hour early (half an hour we could have slept!) so I went along with people who were buying coffee, because it was better than standing around. We had to split up into two groups because there was not enough room on the boat for 20-something people. So first this woman gave a talk about how they do research on improving the nets to reduce bycatch. The room was really cold -- everyone was shivering; I had on three long-sleeved shirts plus a vest, and two pairs of pants, and I was freezing -- and I was really tired, so I think I kept falling asleep. But it's hard to know, because if I was, then I was asleep and I didn't know about it. Then we watched a video about different kinds of fishing, like for groundfish vs. mollusks vs. crustaceans.
Finally it was our turn for the boat. As we went out, the guy who used to teach policy at W-M talked to us about the waters and the shipyard and such, and marine salvage, this sort of thing. If a boat is burning, you are expected by law to save the people on board, and you are fined $10k and a year of prison if you don't. If you save the boat, or at least keep it from sinking, whoever's boat it is has to pay you a percentage of the value of the boat. That's just the way it is.
When we got out far enough, they put down the net, and while we towed it for 20-30 mintues, he talked more. Then we brought up the net and they dumped it on the deck. There were about 40 lobsters, all but two of them undersized, one really soft because it had just molted, one that was about five inches long total. There were a bunch of crabs, tons of squid (about 6-8" long) and lots of fish. There were winter and summer flounder, which are born with eyes on either side of their heads like humans, because they swim upright like a cod/mackerel/bass, but then at some point their eyes migrate and they swim flat. If the eyes migrate to the left, they are summer; if it is to the right, then they are a winter flounder. We played with the dying aquatic life for quite a while. There were these little fishes that died with their mouths wide open, so that they looked really surprised.
The guy let us take home a bunch of fish, like five flounder and five bluefish. He showed us how to fillet them, and lent us his knife to take home for the night. We packed the fish in ice. A few hours after getting back -- don't worry, Ashley went home for the day, because she would be in the emergency room many times over by now -- we got to work and filleted the fish. It was not as easy as he made it look, partly because he had done it a lot more than we had, and partly because his knife was a lot sharper than the ones we were using (not all of us could use his). But eventually we got it all filleted. We also ripped the bodies out of the squid, and I saved the cuttlebones. I think we must have had about 60 squid, judging from the number of cuttlebones. Every so often when you stuck your fingers inside the squid to pull out the body, you'd get ink all over your fingers. That's pretty neat, because I've read about squid doing that since I was in elementary school, and now you know, they really do. I washed the cuttlebones twice with soap (because I live in a house where fish is banned) and put them in my window between the screen and the glass to dry. I will make some sort of mobile or something. If you haven't seen cuttlebones, you'd think they were plastic, but they're actually the backbone-ish thing, the part that make squid an element of molluska.
Then a few hours later, it was time to cook them. So we painted this sauce made of horseradish, mayonnaise, and mustard (I think -- Hallie made it, not me) on the fish, and put lemon juice (from lemons) and salt and pepper on it, and put it on tinfoil on the grill. That was the bluefish. For the flounder, they egged and breaded and baked or fried it. I'm not quite sure, because I had to go look for my driver's license in the meantime, so I missed the flounder part. But then I went over and ate some. Actually I was in Johnston eating flounder, and I decided I wanted to try the bluefish, since I had started the whole seasoning and grilling thing, so I just took my plate out the back door of Johnston, went in the back of Carr, got some fish, and then returned to Johnston.
Now I have to pack. I won't have Internet access for a while, until about the middle of the trip. So, you'll just have to subsist without boomvang updates, which you seem to have been doing quite well for the past few days. Obviously.
Oh, and if you comment, you'll notice that you have to type the word you see. That's because I got one spam comment, and although I looked up how to delete it and eventually did so, I simply cannot be bothered to go around deleting spam comments. So, type in the word, and be merry.
Happy birthday to Becca tomorrow (I mailed her present a month ago) and happy anniversary to my parents on Thursday (I mailed their present yesterday).
Unfortunately the rest of that day was spent writing my history paper. It was a really boring topic, and unfortunately I wrote a boring paper to answer it, which was basically because I resented the question and was thus not interested in writing an interesting paper. At least the paper addressed the question, the entire question, and nothing but the question.
Yesterday evening we had a "yay, we're done with work" party. We had people over to bring their perishable food, and we played a fun game called Apples to Apples. Then Rebecca (the one at Williams-Mystic) had this paper summarizing her summer research that she needed edited, so I spent a few hours editing it. It was about how her university can address environmental issues through all sorts of things, like dining services and facilities management, but also through the general curriculum.
It was a short night, because this morning we got up at 5:30 for breakfast at Carr house (carrot-zucchini-chocolate muffins and crepes) at 5:45 before mustering at Labaree at 6:30 for the fishing trip. We got to the place half an hour early (half an hour we could have slept!) so I went along with people who were buying coffee, because it was better than standing around. We had to split up into two groups because there was not enough room on the boat for 20-something people. So first this woman gave a talk about how they do research on improving the nets to reduce bycatch. The room was really cold -- everyone was shivering; I had on three long-sleeved shirts plus a vest, and two pairs of pants, and I was freezing -- and I was really tired, so I think I kept falling asleep. But it's hard to know, because if I was, then I was asleep and I didn't know about it. Then we watched a video about different kinds of fishing, like for groundfish vs. mollusks vs. crustaceans.
Finally it was our turn for the boat. As we went out, the guy who used to teach policy at W-M talked to us about the waters and the shipyard and such, and marine salvage, this sort of thing. If a boat is burning, you are expected by law to save the people on board, and you are fined $10k and a year of prison if you don't. If you save the boat, or at least keep it from sinking, whoever's boat it is has to pay you a percentage of the value of the boat. That's just the way it is.
When we got out far enough, they put down the net, and while we towed it for 20-30 mintues, he talked more. Then we brought up the net and they dumped it on the deck. There were about 40 lobsters, all but two of them undersized, one really soft because it had just molted, one that was about five inches long total. There were a bunch of crabs, tons of squid (about 6-8" long) and lots of fish. There were winter and summer flounder, which are born with eyes on either side of their heads like humans, because they swim upright like a cod/mackerel/bass, but then at some point their eyes migrate and they swim flat. If the eyes migrate to the left, they are summer; if it is to the right, then they are a winter flounder. We played with the dying aquatic life for quite a while. There were these little fishes that died with their mouths wide open, so that they looked really surprised.
The guy let us take home a bunch of fish, like five flounder and five bluefish. He showed us how to fillet them, and lent us his knife to take home for the night. We packed the fish in ice. A few hours after getting back -- don't worry, Ashley went home for the day, because she would be in the emergency room many times over by now -- we got to work and filleted the fish. It was not as easy as he made it look, partly because he had done it a lot more than we had, and partly because his knife was a lot sharper than the ones we were using (not all of us could use his). But eventually we got it all filleted. We also ripped the bodies out of the squid, and I saved the cuttlebones. I think we must have had about 60 squid, judging from the number of cuttlebones. Every so often when you stuck your fingers inside the squid to pull out the body, you'd get ink all over your fingers. That's pretty neat, because I've read about squid doing that since I was in elementary school, and now you know, they really do. I washed the cuttlebones twice with soap (because I live in a house where fish is banned) and put them in my window between the screen and the glass to dry. I will make some sort of mobile or something. If you haven't seen cuttlebones, you'd think they were plastic, but they're actually the backbone-ish thing, the part that make squid an element of molluska.
Then a few hours later, it was time to cook them. So we painted this sauce made of horseradish, mayonnaise, and mustard (I think -- Hallie made it, not me) on the fish, and put lemon juice (from lemons) and salt and pepper on it, and put it on tinfoil on the grill. That was the bluefish. For the flounder, they egged and breaded and baked or fried it. I'm not quite sure, because I had to go look for my driver's license in the meantime, so I missed the flounder part. But then I went over and ate some. Actually I was in Johnston eating flounder, and I decided I wanted to try the bluefish, since I had started the whole seasoning and grilling thing, so I just took my plate out the back door of Johnston, went in the back of Carr, got some fish, and then returned to Johnston.
Now I have to pack. I won't have Internet access for a while, until about the middle of the trip. So, you'll just have to subsist without boomvang updates, which you seem to have been doing quite well for the past few days. Obviously.
Oh, and if you comment, you'll notice that you have to type the word you see. That's because I got one spam comment, and although I looked up how to delete it and eventually did so, I simply cannot be bothered to go around deleting spam comments. So, type in the word, and be merry.
Happy birthday to Becca tomorrow (I mailed her present a month ago) and happy anniversary to my parents on Thursday (I mailed their present yesterday).
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Tuesday
This morning I thought class was starting 15 minutes later than it was, so when I got back from my run I had 12 minutes to change, eat breakfast, and get to class (so much for the shower). Luckily class was in Craig Cottage, just across the yard and parking lot. We talked about volcanoes and tsunamis, which was interesting. Apparently the Pacific Northwest is maybe going to have a big tsunami soon. Here is some advice: If you are on a volcano that starts exploding, run downhill. If you are where a tsunami is going to hit, run uphill.
Then we had class, in which Abby gave her presentation on Seaman's Protection Certificates, and Glenn told us about the War of 1812 and the maritime commerce events leading up to it.
After lunch, I read the book that Kathy sent me, about the Essex, a ship that was struck by a whale and then what happened to the sailors in their whale boats afterwards. I read the whole thing. It was a good book.
Today in the mail I received my book from the MAA that I am going to review for Math Horizons magazine. (I am on the student editorial board of Math Horizons now.) It is about Euler, and has way more equations in it than I expected. The other one that should arrive sometime soon is about the history of minimal surfaces. That might have a lot of equations, too.
This evening I will go to Celestial Navigation class at the planetarium. We had to plot some things for homework. That was kind of fun, but kind of tedious, especially because we have two isoscles right triangles instead of parallel rulers, so it takes a lot of work just to get a parallel line. So, I'll be going now.
Then we had class, in which Abby gave her presentation on Seaman's Protection Certificates, and Glenn told us about the War of 1812 and the maritime commerce events leading up to it.
After lunch, I read the book that Kathy sent me, about the Essex, a ship that was struck by a whale and then what happened to the sailors in their whale boats afterwards. I read the whole thing. It was a good book.
Today in the mail I received my book from the MAA that I am going to review for Math Horizons magazine. (I am on the student editorial board of Math Horizons now.) It is about Euler, and has way more equations in it than I expected. The other one that should arrive sometime soon is about the history of minimal surfaces. That might have a lot of equations, too.
This evening I will go to Celestial Navigation class at the planetarium. We had to plot some things for homework. That was kind of fun, but kind of tedious, especially because we have two isoscles right triangles instead of parallel rulers, so it takes a lot of work just to get a parallel line. So, I'll be going now.
Monday, September 26, 2005
Motorboat
Today in maritime skills, we learned to use the motorboat. This is because it was very windy, much too windy to go sailing in little boats with little experience. It was quite difficult to back in to the dock, because turning the engine only turns the stern, and it's very counter-intuitive. Driving backwards in a car is much easier, although I suppose if I learned to back around in a rear-wheel-drive car then it would be easier to do it in a boat. (Is this true?)
This morning in Literature, I was actually glad that I had read The Sea Wolf, because Dan talked about it a fair amount. We mostly talked about how John Steinbeck's portrayal of women is not very considerate. That's an odd thing to talk about in Literature of the Sea class when we're discussing a book about a place we're going to visit next week, but hey, at least people had vehement views on it.
This evening I have been doing research for my marine policy paper on aquaculture off of Deer Isle. About half of the names that come up are people that I have heard of (e.g., Hubert). So that's pretty neat. It's nice that people's phone numbers and addresses pop right up on Google. It would have been a lot harder to find these things even just a year or two ago.
Val's mom is showing all of you other people up in terms of comments, people.
The whaling panel on Friday was pretty interesting. Jim talked about the species of marine mammals (whales, dolphins, seals, porpoises -- which are different from dolphins -- and sea cows, which are like manatees) and it turns out that out of the 129 known species, only three are extinct. That's nice. Glenn told us the history of whaling and whaling technology, and showed us films of whaling, both the traditional way on the Morgan and then the Norway way with steamboats and harpoon guns on factory ships. Peter talked about maritime literature, how if you want to write a novel about the sea, you have to try to make it better than Moby Dick, which is... really hard. Lisa told us such interesting things as the factoid that blue whales, the largest land animal ever (200 tons) consume 1.5 million calories per day to maintain body weight. That's kilocalories, people calories, people. Just-born calves gain 200 pounds a day of permanent body weight. And then the whaling ships come along and chop them up and boil their fat to light and lubricate the developed world.
That all was about 1.5-2 hours. Then after a short break, Katy talked for about two hours about the policy decisions, including the ineffective international conferences on whaling and the trade implications of the current policy. You see, the USA could bully other countries into signing the whaling treaty (to protect whales) by putting trade embargoes on them, but that would be against current free trade agreements. And yet who's going to stop us? We're America! Yeah, that's a problem. At the beginning we had to vote whether we thought they should keep the current moratorium (with exemptions for aboriginal and scientific whaling) on whaling, if it was biologically and culturally defensible to take the whales. By the end there was a reversal of opinion, something like 4-14 to allow whaling at the beginning and 14-4 to continue the moratorium at the end.
Now it's raining. And I really want to go running. But I guess I'll have to wait until tomorrow, because I have more homework to do for tomorrow.
Note the new sidebar addition. Ha! Ha! That is in our student handbook, and they're totally serious. It's really dangerous. And I bet you won't find that in any other rule book anywhere.
This morning in Literature, I was actually glad that I had read The Sea Wolf, because Dan talked about it a fair amount. We mostly talked about how John Steinbeck's portrayal of women is not very considerate. That's an odd thing to talk about in Literature of the Sea class when we're discussing a book about a place we're going to visit next week, but hey, at least people had vehement views on it.
This evening I have been doing research for my marine policy paper on aquaculture off of Deer Isle. About half of the names that come up are people that I have heard of (e.g., Hubert). So that's pretty neat. It's nice that people's phone numbers and addresses pop right up on Google. It would have been a lot harder to find these things even just a year or two ago.
Val's mom is showing all of you other people up in terms of comments, people.
The whaling panel on Friday was pretty interesting. Jim talked about the species of marine mammals (whales, dolphins, seals, porpoises -- which are different from dolphins -- and sea cows, which are like manatees) and it turns out that out of the 129 known species, only three are extinct. That's nice. Glenn told us the history of whaling and whaling technology, and showed us films of whaling, both the traditional way on the Morgan and then the Norway way with steamboats and harpoon guns on factory ships. Peter talked about maritime literature, how if you want to write a novel about the sea, you have to try to make it better than Moby Dick, which is... really hard. Lisa told us such interesting things as the factoid that blue whales, the largest land animal ever (200 tons) consume 1.5 million calories per day to maintain body weight. That's kilocalories, people calories, people. Just-born calves gain 200 pounds a day of permanent body weight. And then the whaling ships come along and chop them up and boil their fat to light and lubricate the developed world.
That all was about 1.5-2 hours. Then after a short break, Katy talked for about two hours about the policy decisions, including the ineffective international conferences on whaling and the trade implications of the current policy. You see, the USA could bully other countries into signing the whaling treaty (to protect whales) by putting trade embargoes on them, but that would be against current free trade agreements. And yet who's going to stop us? We're America! Yeah, that's a problem. At the beginning we had to vote whether we thought they should keep the current moratorium (with exemptions for aboriginal and scientific whaling) on whaling, if it was biologically and culturally defensible to take the whales. By the end there was a reversal of opinion, something like 4-14 to allow whaling at the beginning and 14-4 to continue the moratorium at the end.
Now it's raining. And I really want to go running. But I guess I'll have to wait until tomorrow, because I have more homework to do for tomorrow.
Note the new sidebar addition. Ha! Ha! That is in our student handbook, and they're totally serious. It's really dangerous. And I bet you won't find that in any other rule book anywhere.
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Yeah, Williams
Yes, I did go to Williams again. No, I didn't just go last weekend -- last weekend Kathy, Alan and Nicholas came to visit, and it was Alumni Weekend. I did go the previous weekend, two weeks ago. I think that there won't be any good opportunity to go there for the rest of the semester, considering the timing of field seminars, and there was a convenient ride, and two of the people in my house and three in an adjacent house were all leaving this weekend, so it was a good weekend to go (although I missed surfing at 6:30 this morning).
I was reading this book in the car and on the bus, The Sea Wolf by Jack London. I really liked it. But it turned out that we didn't have to read it for class tomorrow as I thought we did. Hmmmm. Oh well; I do highly recommend it. The premise is similar to that of Captains Courageous, in that a rich and cultured person (in this case a 35-year-old man) who has never had to do anything for himself falls off of a steamship and is rescued by a fishing vessel that refuses to take him ashore and instead takes him on as a member of the crew on a months-long voyage. A very similar premise, but a very different story, because the point is that the captain is a violent yet highly intelligent man. There is also a love story. Quite a good book; I'm glad I read it, because if I hadn't thought that it was required, I might not have. Did I say that I recommend the 1930s movie of Captains Courageous? I do.
We have a bunch of paper-like stuff due this week. Ugh. But Friday is the fishing trip, and then we go to California! Woo hoo.
I was reading this book in the car and on the bus, The Sea Wolf by Jack London. I really liked it. But it turned out that we didn't have to read it for class tomorrow as I thought we did. Hmmmm. Oh well; I do highly recommend it. The premise is similar to that of Captains Courageous, in that a rich and cultured person (in this case a 35-year-old man) who has never had to do anything for himself falls off of a steamship and is rescued by a fishing vessel that refuses to take him ashore and instead takes him on as a member of the crew on a months-long voyage. A very similar premise, but a very different story, because the point is that the captain is a violent yet highly intelligent man. There is also a love story. Quite a good book; I'm glad I read it, because if I hadn't thought that it was required, I might not have. Did I say that I recommend the 1930s movie of Captains Courageous? I do.
We have a bunch of paper-like stuff due this week. Ugh. But Friday is the fishing trip, and then we go to California! Woo hoo.
