Author: Arianna Johns

Working on a ship is definitely not always adventure, fun, and cool science. There are things to get accustomed to that can’t be accounted for no matter how carefully you plan your life. There are events that can conspire to tear apart the very fabric of your day to day reality. When every day is exactly like the last one, and you are on night shift, so you never really see day light time takes on a whole new meaning. Days aren’t days, time skews in a direction that is fundamentally inconsequential and frankly days get lost. I lost three total days quite literally. I thought it was Sunday when in fact it was Wednesday. I have never had this happen quite so fully. We all experience the waking up and thinking it is one day but it is in fact another. But this past two weeks has literally been Ground hog day for me every day. I awoke generally a couple hours before sunset, so mentally I wasn’t quite awake until after the sun went down.  I had been getting maybe 4 hours of sleep a night on a GREAT night. So by the end of two weeks I was run down, a little irritable, and completely not mentally on my A game anymore.

We unloaded the last science cruise, I finally got to do some laundry, then we began loading the next cruise just under 2 hours after we had finished re-arranging the deck for the next cruise. So between being sleep deprived for two weeks, standing in for a deck hand, helping pass countless large instruments across to a dock because we have no gangway, making sure the science party had all their things, then helping load on GIANT frames for acoustic devices, getting thrown around like a rag doll because they asked me to stand on one of the frame legs while it was raised into the air via a crane, waking up this morning to a torrential down pour in which we got underway, it had been a long few weeks. My mind is mush, my body aches, and I don’t know what day of the week it is because all the clocks on this ship read different days. It is a small boat, and impossible to get any alone time. So I spent the entire day in my bunk sleeping after we got underway. 

But on the bright side I am learning about how the ADCP works, which is a fascinating piece of equipment that is constantly running in the background. It is one of the many pieces of equipment that the Marine tech must keep functioning at all times. ADCP stands for Accoustic Doppler Current Profiler. As I am sure most of you know the Doppler effect is how the pitch of a sound changes when an object if moving toward you or away from you. It is the same thing old school police radar used, and what the weather man uses in order to show you groovy cloud formations moving over your area and bringing you either happy rain or beautiful sunny days. Well the ADCP sends out a sound pulse and uses what are called scatterers that bounce back the sound in order to determine which way the current is going. Typical scatterers are Euphasiids, pteropods, and copepods to name a few. These planktonic creatures are fairly well distributed in a given water column. The typical ADCP unit has 4 transducers that is oriented in a specific way in relation to the ship. By knowing the orientation of these transducers, along with the use of our various navigation systems of which GPS is a component we are able to deduce the rate of flow of the current, it’s direction, and it’s depth.

At first thought the ADCP doesn’t sound like it would be a piece of equipment that needs to be run all the time, but you have to remember our ships are meant to be able to stay in one location very precisely in order to deploy various equipment. So we must be able to compensate for the current that is at the surface affecting the ship, as well as the currents at depth where the instrumentation may be experiencing different forces. So this is just one of the many behind the scenes pieces of equipment that without our job would be nearly impossible. Next week I think I will tell you about the POS/MV which stands for Position and Orientation System for Marine Vessels. This piece of equipment is very intricate and EXTREMELY important in day to day functioning. 

This internship is coming to a close for me. I have been doing the MATE/UNOLS thing since February 10^th when I first flew to Cape Town to get on the KNORR. It has been a singularly unique experience in my life thus far. I have seen things and done things I never thought imaginable. I have met people I never would have, had I not taken that giant step and applied. I have been places that none of my friends have been, and some places none of them will ever get to go. For god’s sake I got a tour of the inside of the new ALVIN submersible twice.  I found out that people value my input on technical problems, and that my solutions sometimes are rather unique.

This internship is not a walk in the park; it is not easy by any stretch of the imagination. I have been physically removed from my family and friends for nearly a year. Granted this is cake walk compared to the isolation friends of mine in the military have endured, but I am not that courageous. I am generally a socially gregarious person in that I always have friends around unless I am embroiled in studying prior to an exam. I used to do my homework in a bar. So you can just imagine how not used to being alone I am. Right now I feel very alone, most the time during the internship, you have people you are friendly with, but it takes a long time to develop those friendships where you can just spill your guts about how you are feeling. You don’t always have that outlet. Have a friend back home prepared for the email rants that will likely ensue as you shift your whole world view. You are settling into a new lifestyle. Being a marine technician is much more than just a job, it is fundamentally a lifestyle, and it’s one of those things you are either ready for or you aren’t. Don’t feel bad either way.

You will begin to make friends with people who share in your new life, these people are indispensable at helping you navigate this whole new world that isn’t quite as easy to understand as you might think. Just the vocabulary you need to learn to become competent is quite different than the vernacular you would generally use in most work places. Not many jobs have their own words for left and right, front and back, but sailing does, and learning these words early will help you in ways you won’t quite understand till you are yelling at someone to grab the line on the port rail and they just stand there and stare at you.

You can’t be ready for everything though. Invariably something that no one thought that could happen will happen, and it is in these stressful tension filled times you can really help out. You can go back in the blog and read my entry about machining a bearing press when we were unable to easily pull the bearing from a seatel mount hiseasnet antenna.

So there is totally no way to predict with any certainty what you will be facing as the ship pulls away from the pier and science begins. All we can do is prepare ourselves in a general sense by understanding how systems function. Most things work as part of systems, so getting comfortable with seeing a piece of equipment in its constituent parts is a must. I just spent the last couple weeks tearing apart and fixing, successfully a camera pedestal for a TV studio quality camera. At first you might think, meh it’s a tripod, which essentially it is. But it also costs nearly $20,000, which is more than my car cost brand new. I had to rip this entire thing apart to change out three orings in the very middle, and we weren’t even positive that was where the problem really was. So I took it apart, found all the orings then had to wait for a week to get them, then put this giant monstrosity back together and this morning filled it with nitrogen. It is holding well.

So also be prepared to work on things whose price will terrify you. Be comfortable with getting elbow deep in things you have never seen before or taken apart. Trust in your ability to take things apart and find the faulty section. Have at least one friend who you are willing to become extremely closes with and share those times when you are terrified and feeling alone in the middle of the ocean. It can be a scary place. The loneliness at times can become all encompassing. The rewards for a job well done are the scientist may never have interrupted service time; their science can be conducted without worry that something may break and may not be fixed. They trust in you to know your stuff in a very general way, and across many fields of discipline.