I have found this post extremely difficult to write. The experience was so life changing that words will never be able to put it into perspective. SEA was the best thing that ever happened to me and I even returned as a deckhand after I graduated from college. Below is the SSV Corwith Cramer, a ship that would become my home for a month as we conducted oceanographic research in the Caribbean.
The night before our trip we found ourselves on St. Croix during a festival so we all went to hang out on the pier. Behind is one of the scientists of our trip who creeped into our picture when he heard us explaining who we were to the guy taking our photo.
Before we could set sail we had to spend a day docked while learning basic linehandling, navigation, and safety drills. Below is our chief scientist, Rick, in an immersion suit while our caption, Elliot, describes its function.
Speaking of linehandling, this is the most beautiful ballantyne coil I've ever seen!
And here is a view of the island while training from the boat.
While onboard everything that you brought with you lives in your bunk. It is all the personal space that's allowed as you have to fit all the students and crew on a 140 ft long boat.
You also eat below in the main saloon on gimbled tables. They move as the boat does so that everyone's plates and food don't spill everywhere. As you remain stationary on the bench however your perspective becomes skewed, making the first few days of eating an interesting challenging to get accustomed to.
Underway! Here's the tops'l, coarse and main stays'l set.
There is a huge amount of effort placed into safety and cleanliness while onboard. There are boat checks and engine room checks done hourly as well as hourly positions and weather reported. Here I am on an engine room check making sure everything is running ok (and in need of a clean shirt)!
We began conducting research almost immediately. Here I am operating our hydrowinch and J-frame while scientist Maia and student Sam prepare the carousel and CTD to be deployed over the port side. The carousel contains twelve different bottles that will fire to collect water samples at varying depths ranging from 0-1000m. The CTD in the middle records conductivity, temperature, and depth measurements in order to create water profiles for students to analyze.
Here's an upclose view of the Niskin bottles.
A view of the science deck from the bow.
Here Maia and Greg (the St.Croix guy) lube the hydrowinch wire with fish oil to keep it running well.
We also had a dry lab where we processed samples. Here's Lizzie is working on the oxygen content in some water samples using the Winkler titration and wearing one of the infamous winkle hats!
Another view of the dry-lab. Pam and Maia learning to ID some planton for a 100 count.
And here's Sam at the scope also working on a 100 count. The premise here is that you take a 1 ml scoop of plankton from a sample from which you ID the first 100 organisms you see. We did this twice a day.
Celestial navigation was not required on my trip but one of our deckhands Theo (in the hat) was very into helping students learn how to shoot sun lines, record Local Apparent Noon (LAN), and operate a sextant.
Once students learned all of the lines on the boat they were allowed to climb aloft, a privilege I took full advantage of! Here I am with my bad-ass mate Rocky.
Just steering the boat on a beautiful day. Someone's got laundry drying on the quarterdeck.
The weather wasn't always great, here's the heightened sea state from a large swell.
That's us sheeting in the jib tops'l on a starboard tack.
Like I said, cleaning is a big deal on the boat, here's us swabbing the deck.
Occasionally when not on watch Mike would play guitar for us up on the bowsprit.
As the trip ended we all had to finish our final reports which led to lots of time in the library and working on the ship's laptops.
We had to give our final presentations while onboard using erasable whiteboards, poster paper, and markers. Everything was hand drawn for the presentations creating a very rustic atmosphere. I'm presenting with the huge hat protecting my face (I told you Maeve!)
This is me with my project partner Abby. She was a member of team hard core in Estuaries with me, would take all 4 BUMP courses with me in 2010, and sailed with me the spring after graduating (in december) when we returned to SEA. So, basically she's awesome. Here we are working on the final graphs for our experiment.
Abby in a tuba!
We were interested in why bioluminescent organisms are distributed where they are in the water column. We expected to find a correlation between dissolved oxygen concentrations and bioluminescent potential (measured in Volts, I won't bore you with details you can check THIS out if you want the instrument described) but also looked at temperature, salinity, and density profiles. I can't find my final paper at the moment for a summary graph but here is one of the [DO] v. BP profiles I dug up.
And here is our very unedited station map. I am looking for the nice one, sorry guys!
We did indeed find a strong correlation with [DO] which was pretty exciting, our scientists were pretty skeptical about the whole experiment. They were impressed with our enthusiasm in the experiment regardless of their hypotheses and the project earned the Lara Vincent Award for Original Research from Boston University. You can read about that here
Eventually we had to say goodbye when we had finally sailed our last nautical mile. This trip was pretty amazing in that we only used to motor to get in and out of port. We had an entire month of sailing! As I learned on my trip as a deckhand this is not always the case, and our class was pretty lucky. This is us docking the boat at the end of the trip in Key West.
As I mentioned earlier, this trip was an incredible experience from which I couldn't have asked any more from. The class and crew got along together, the science projects ran without too many mishaps, and the sea treated us well. There is something about living at sea that changes a person, I still recommend the SEA experience to everyone I know and probably talk about it way too much to all my friends. In the end we all said our sad farewells and here is our final class picture with full crew.
"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed in
the things you didn't do than the ones you did do, so throw
off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the
trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover!"
-Mark Twain