Fall 2009. BUMP #1. Block 3.
This course was based out of Woods Hole, MA where we lived for four weeks taking Nautical Science, Oceanography, Maritime Studies, and planning a research project for being at sea. We learned piloting and navigation, dead reckoning, the layout of the sails on the boat we'd be on, weather, the basics of many different types of oceanographic equipment, read about culture in Antigua, studied caribbean communities (I focused on Tilapia aquacultures), identified plankton, covered all realms of oceanographic topics, and eventually presented a research proposal poster.
This was the main building where all of our courses and all of SEA's (Sea Education Association) main offices are
Students (Jaimie and Ariel from Block 2 in fact) working on Nautical Science assignments. This is a nautical chart that we had to do some basic piloting and navigation work on.
We also got to tour some local marine facilities in Woods Hole, historically an oceanographically rich community. Here we are in McClane labs, an engineering department famous for tailor making oceanographic sampling gear and best known for their sediment traps.
Here they're deploying some gear into their test tank where they can observe and work on their gear at actual sampling depths.
We also got to look into some deep ocean sediment cores to see what scientists analyze on Research Vessel's (RV's). Many will wake up to find a core was taken earlier in the day and will spend several hours in the lab cataloging and analyzing the sample.
All of them are stored in a hangar for reference, there are about 30 rows that look like this, literally thousands and thousands of sediment cores!
We also had some time to ourselves, we liked to bike around the area and explore. Unfortunately is was November at the time so finding a warmer day was a bit of a challenge.
Lizzie biking along the beach...
Sometimes at night we would walk along the beach and hang out. This time we found a washed up squid on the shore.
Two enthusiastic students decided to make a fort...
They just so happened to be working on a pteropod experiment using ph as a testing variable hence the strange spelling of fear. I think this fort was made around 3am and pancakes were made in the kitchen soon thereafter. Nicely done Pat and Ariel!
Towards the end we began to realize that previous students had left little notes and clues around the houses. Everyone that has done SEA has lived in the houses on campus (A,B,C,D and E, all named after famous stars and constellations- I was C house or Capella). In this particular case a class let us know that we had 'stolen time.'
They also wrote some inspirational words on the benches in our common area.
We left after an entertaining yet vigorous experience; the academics in SEA are very challenging and demanding. Most of us were ready to get on board the Cramer and begin our research. The whole point of this block was to prepare us for Block 4 where we would eventually take all of our recently acquired knowledge and apply it to learning how to sail, run a ship, and conduct real world oceanographic research!