My Daily Routine

My shift is from 4 pm-12 am, which is actually pretty much perfect as far as my normal sleeping schedule.  I get up around 10-10:30 am, take a shower and relax for a bit before lunch at 11:30.  After lunch, I either relax in my room watching TV shows or reading, and I normally try to go outside and get some fresh air if the weather isn’t too terrible.  This is usually the highlight of my day; despite the cold of the north Atlantic, I do enjoy staring out at the endless ocean, listening to some tunes, and getting lost in thoughts and reflections.  This was a much more frequent activity on my previous cruises, I would normally be outside during the day and also at night to look at the stars, but it’s just a lot less inviting (and normally completely overcast) here, so I don’t get outside for more than an hour a day and I have yet to see any stars.  I’d like to think that it’ll change, but we seem to be right in the path of every storm that is generated between NE Canada and Greenland, so sunshine and clear skies (and thus stars/sunrises/sunsets) will likely remain a rare event.  Storms do offer their own form of entertainment however, last night I enjoyed looking out the window of the mess hall and watching the swells build and the waves crash against the side of the ship.  The extra rolling of the ship does make it even more difficult to sleep than normal and increases the noise level in the data, but otherwise I don’t really mind rough seas.  It definitely makes walking down hallways and up/down stairs much more adventurous.  Sometimes when the ship is really moving, it can actually feel like you’re going up stairs when you are going down.  Hallways feel more like winding hills, and you kind of bounce off either wall as you walk along, which I find much more entertaining than a boring straight flat hallway.  As far as exercise, I have been less active than on previous cruises.  I would normally work out in the gym for 1-2+ hours every other day, but the gym on this boat is just not inviting and it’s hard to get motivated.  They have added an elliptical trainer since my first time on this boat, which is definitely better than the treadmill, but I will never understand the logic of putting only free weights on a boat.  The Kilo Moana’s gym was by far the best, they had a treadmill (which I didn’t use), an exercise bike (which I used a lot), and a weight machine that you could do tons of different exercises on which was usable regardless of the sea conditions.  Free weights definitely get pretty sketchy when the ship starts moving, and with the bench and the weight rack, they take up just as much space as a machine would, so I can’t understand why there is not a weight machine of some kind.  For exercise, I mostly do pushups and crunches in my room, although I’ll have to force myself to go to the gym some more.  Pushups are also interesting when the seas are rough, when the ship is rolling one way, you feel like superman and can do them with almost no effort, then it rolls the opposite way and it’s tough to even do one.

As I’ve mentioned, my job on the ship is to help my advisor with processing the data we collect.  The only part I’ve done entirely on my own is the backscatter processing, and I already described that in my last post, so I won’t talk about the specifics here.  It only takes maybe an hour out of my 8 hour shift, but I have to stay in the computer lab the entire time so there is a lot of bored down time while I’m on my shift.  This is spent wasting time on the internet, chatting with the other people in the lab, and working a little bit on writing my first PhD paper (which I need to do a lot more of).  I have now moved on to using my advisor’s script to process the bathymetry, and as soon as he gets the scripts together for the gravity and magnetics, I’ll work on those as well.  It’s not really necessary for me to do any of this since he is the one writing the scripts (except for the backscatter) and there is more than enough time for him to process the data during his shift.  I have processed bathymetry data before as well, so I’m already pretty familiar with everything that his script is doing.  However, the valuable part for me will be getting some actual experience processing both gravity and magnetic data, neither of which I have done much of before, and both of which will be a part of my PhD work.  Apparently the magnetic processing script is pretty much good to go, but I think my advisor is still finishing up the gravity script.  I’ll give some more details on that when I start working with it.