Random thoughts after a week and a half

1) My opinion of the food has improved a bit since the beginning, although overall it is still not quite as good as the KM. The quality of meals is generally more variable, but we have had some pretty delicious stuff and there is a little more variety in the types of food than the KM. We had rack of lamb last night along with a pretty good chicken curry, we had a nice turkey/stuffing/mashed potatoes/gravy type meal for Christmas, and supposedly we are having a bbq for New Year's day tonight. We've had chow mein and fried rice, various types of soups, fried chicken, sandwiches, short ribs, burgers, hot dogs, and more. There is a somewhat disappointing variety of veggies in the salad bar though, the KM salad bar definitely was better. The KM had some good snacks, but it was the same stuff for the entire cruise, whereas they keep pulling out new snacks every few days on this boat. They have chocolate, candy, multiple kinds of chips, beef jerky, fruit snacks were just brought out yesterday, and I'm sure we'll see some more snack variety before the cruise is over. Probably the only advantage in terms of food that the Langseth (my first ship) had over the KM and the Thompson is the ice cream, they had six huge tubs of it that were constantly available. One of them was rainbow sherbert, which was pretty much all the dessert I needed on the first cruise. Others with more normal tastes in desserts would probably appreciate the fresh made cakes, pies, cookies, and pastries more than I, but I rarely eat any of those. They do have egg nog on this boat though, that is my typical dinner time dessert (although as with all store brand egg nog, it pales in comparison to Berkeley Farms egg nog. If you live in the Bay Area, you probably know what I'm talking about).

2) The crew on this boat seem to be the least friendly of the three overall, although on every cruise there seems to be at least a few crew members that for some reason don't like the scientists (specifically the male scientists). They always seem to be friendly to the female scientists though, which I guess is not surprising since the ratio of men to women is usually around 10:1. The crew has sort of made the library their "territory" and the one time I went in there a few nights ago I felt like I was interrupting a private party and got some dirty looks from a few people in there. With that said, there are plenty of nice people in the crew that I've chatted with a bit, and the marine techs (the people who work directly with the scientists) are nice, as they usually are. I don't want to make it seem like the crew is mean or anything, I just feel like there are a few of them that are resentful of us for some reason and just aren't very friendly (Sam (another UH grad student) has noticed the same thing, so it's not just me). We'll see if my opinion changes as the cruise goes on, it could just take them a little while to warm up to us.

3) We have had issues with just about every piece of scientific equipment so far; nothing that is preventing us from getting the data we want, but everything has not gone smoothly. The deep-towed sonar has been having problems, mostly on the starboard side, since the beginning. The sidescan returns were very weak for the first survey and the bathymetry data pretty much looked like crap, maybe a third of the starboard swath was actually usable data. After the first survey area, they found a short in the starboard electronics and fixed it, so it has improved for the beginning of the second survey area, but apparently it is still not quite as good as it should be. One of the MAPR's, which is an instrument that we attach to the sonar tow cable to detect the signature of a hydrothermal plume in the water column, crapped out on us as well, but there are extras so it wasn't a big deal. The dredging also has not gone as well as hoped. They have had a few good dredge hauls with a fair number of rocks, but some of the dredges have come up empty and many have been very small. They were actually picking little tiny bits of rock off of the deck with tweezers on a few dredges because they needed to get every last bit of rock that they could. On the last cruise, we would have just swept that stuff overboard, we always got at least a full 5 gallon bucket worth of rocks, and sometimes as much as 8 full buckets. The variety of the rocks in the first survey area was also not very exciting. All of the samples were pretty much the same stuff: all basalt (the typical lava composition erupted at most spreading centers), with no visible crystals, not much variation in texture, and very few vesicles (gas bubbles). It definitely makes me appreciate both the quantity and variety of rocks that we got on the last cruise. However, we are now mapping the forearc rifts and will be dredging these after the mapping is done, so we will almost certainly see a greater variety of rocks along these structures than the first survey area which was along the backarc spreading center.

4) Two nights ago was the best stargazing I've seen on any of the cruises so far. There were a ton of stars and I could actually see the Milky Way, which I have not seen on either of the other boats. I spent almost an hour laying out on the hammock, listening to some tunes, and looking at the stars, it was really nice. It helps that the fore deck of this ship is darker than the other two so there is less light to interfere, plus there was no moon. However, I still don't feel like it was better than the stars I've seen camping out in the Sierras or Northern California, you just can't get complete darkness because they always have to have at least some lights on on the ship.

5) We did have a mini New Year's Eve celebration last night in the main lab. The scientists from U. Rhode Island and UT Dallas bought a blue godzilla pinata in Guam and we had some fun taking turns hitting it, so it was nice to do something a little festive. Otherwise, New Year's pretty much has felt like any other day on the cruise. In case I hadn't mentioned this already, alcohol is no longer allowed on American research vessels, so there was no champagne to start the new year.