More thoughts...

It is Valentine's Day on the boat (tomorrow for all of you), and we have officially crossed the halfway point of the cruise. On the one hand, it's a nice milestone and it feels good to have gotten this far, and on the other hand, that means we still have over 3 weeks left (~22 days). It feels like we've been on the boat for months already, I can't believe that we have that much longer to go. We are in the last phase of shooting the airguns over the northern area, which is ~1/2 the size of the first area. After we're done shooting, we will go back and pick up all of the instruments and the experiment will be done. Any extra time will probably be used for mapping between here and Fiji using the multibeam echosounder, the other two sonar-like devices, the gravimeter, and the magnetometer, which is the data that my advisor is most interested in and the only data that may have some relevance to my thesis. Unfortunately, even though it looks like we will be done at least a few days early (assuming the shooting and instrument recovery goes well), it doesn't seem like there's any chance of arriving in Fiji early.

1. A nice thing that I realized a while ago is that we don't have any bugs on the boat. No cockroaches, no ants, no mosquitoes, no spiders, none of the usual pests that annoy land-dwellers. You can leave food out and uncovered and it doesn't get mobbed by roaches (I guess that's more of a Hawaiian problem), but it is one positive point that I thought was worth mentioning. I've got to hold on to all of the positives I can, because there aren't too many.

2. I at least partially understand why people are actually willingly choose to work on a boat as a career. I learned this from talking to the guy (Bern) who is a watch leader and spends most of his time in the lab with us. For one, they make very good wages. Bern said that he makes ~$400 a day (7 days a week), meaning if he worked a full year, it would be over $100k. I imagine his income is on the high end for the normal crew members, but the captain and 3 mates (guys that actually pilot the boat) probably make even more than he does. Also, they only work about half the year on average, anything from 4 to 11 months, based on what I've heard. I guess that would be about the only way you could convince anyone to do this job, so it makes sense.

3. For the last week and a half, we have been experiencing tropical summer weather, which is pretty brutal. It's in the 90's every day, and is extremely humid. It's noticeably worse than anything I have experienced in Hawaii as of yet. I only go outside at night or in the early morning, it's just not comfortable during the afternoon.

4. Despite the sleep schedule, I am actually happy that I got the night shift, which surprises me to say. I don't think I would sleep that well on a normal schedule anyway, so that's somewhat of a moot point. First of all, we have 3 students on the night shift vs. 2 during the day, so we actually get more free time because we can split up the watch duties. Also, it is quieter and there are less people around, so we get a little more freedom in our activities. They have a surround sound system in the main lab which I always plug my Zen mp3 player into, which I'm not sure I could do as much during the day. Also, we get to play cards and yahtzee during our shift, another thing that I don't think would be as acceptable during the day.

5. We had a ping-pong tournament which 22 people participated in. I made it to the second round, but had to face the captain, who I predict is going to be the winner of the tournament (he's in the final 3 right now). I could have made it to the semi-finals at least if I hadn't faced him. Oh well, it was a fun distraction, and we even have a camera set up so we can watch the games in the main lab.

6. After a 5 or 6 year hiatus, I actually started drawing again. I'm happy to say that (at least with graphite) I haven't lost my abilities. I did a drawing of the view from the Hopi granaries in the Grand Canyon (see photo below). I think I need to pick something a little less complex for my next attempt. I'm not the kind of person that can just gloss over details, so it was a pretty difficult drawing for my first attempt in a long time. I tried a watercolor painting earlier today, but it was pretty much a disaster. I've only done one watercolor before in high school (which turned out pretty good), but it really doesn't suit my artistic style. I'm a very slow and careful artist (some might say a perfectionist), and watercolor forces you to go fast because you can't blend it very well once the paint dries. Acrylic is my favorite kind of paint, very easy to blend, easy to make fine details, and you can actually paint over mistakes, which is virtually impossible with watercolor (tempera is pretty good too). I then tried a colored pencil drawing, but the pencils I brought are not very good for blending and they have a limited color range; I failed pretty miserably on that too. I should have brought the prismacolors, which are definitely the best ones out there. I thought these ones might be good too; it turns out they weren't, oh well. I've also been volunteered to do a t-shirt design for the cruise, so we'll see how that turns out.


7. Lastly, this photo is a correction from the previous photo of the color of the ocean that I posted earlier. After looking at that, I realized that it did not represent the color of the deep ocean well at all. It's way too bright and turqouise colored, either an effect of the camera, or because it was taken near Tonga in shallow water. Here is a photo that more closely matches the color of the water (which of course varies based on the time of day and weather).