Friday, December 2, 2011

The Final Post (until the next cruise...)

Well, we are officially nearing the end of the cruise, less than 3 days left until we’re back in Apia. I have had some interesting experiences, seen some cool rocks, and eaten some delicious food, but it is safe to say I’m ready to be back home, especially with the prospect of another month-long cruise looming in less than 3 weeks. We have completed 25 dredges, with two (or maybe 3) more planned for tomorrow (Saturday). Then we will start transiting back to Apia around 2-3 am Sun morning, hopefully arriving in port on Sun afternoon and getting off the ship by 8 or 9 pm Sun night. Then, a 2 am ~4 hr flight to Auckland, NZ, a ~6 hr layover there, and another ~9 hr flight back to Honolulu. Needless to say I’m not looking forward to that. We’ve still only had one dredge with a significant amount of sulfides in it, unless we get really lucky tomorrow. The AUV is still having issues, the last few times it has only come back with at most a third of the data it should have collected. Apparently, the data-related problems are nearly all due to the multibeam sonar unit made by a company called Reson (not the German company Geomar that owns the AUV itself). It’s possible Reson may get sued for lost ship time (which is in the range of $30,000+ a day) but I’m not entirely sure. One side benefit for me (and my advisor) to all of the AUV problems is that we have gotten to do a lot more mapping with the ship's multibeam sonar system than we initially expected to do. We have filled in a number of gaps and extended the width of some of the previously mapped areas, which will be quite useful when I start looking at this area for my first PhD paper. Overall, this cruise experience has been significantly better than my first cruise on the Langseth, although 30 days is still a long time to be on a boat. The ship is nicer, food is MUCH better, the shorter duration of the cruise helped, having the previous experience under my belt also helped, and in general I had a better attitude about this cruise from the beginning. On the last one, I focused too much on how long I was going to be stuck on the boat and was just too negative in general, whereas I had a much more accepting, go-with-the-flow attitude this time. Attitude certainly makes a difference. Well, I think that’s all I’ve got for now, I’ll probably start the next episode by 12/22-12/23 when I am onboard the R/V Thomas G. Thompson south of Guam.

A photo from one of the nicer sunsets, thought it was appropriate for the final post.

p.s. I'm still going to attempt to upload more photos to previous posts, although probably not as many as I would like given the painfully slow internet connection. Update: Done!! Check the older posts for new photos.

No comments:

Post a Comment