Hi all! We are now just a day out from returning to port in Narragansett. This week has been a lot of packing up stuff, working on miscellaneous improvement tasks, helping the scientists with their ongoing sampling, and working on some small scripting projects in my extra time. One of the big projects early on this week was disassembling the entire multicorer and packing it all up in crates for storage.
That’s all that’s left! [Photo by Gabe Matthias]
Besides that, we’ve been doing lots of cleaning, refinishing tables, and reorganizing, the tasks that have to be taken care of when there’s time between cruises.
Cleaning, organizing [Photos by Gabe Matthias]
We’ve also definitely left the Tropics behind by now. While not quite the weather we’ll be returning to, it’s now in the 50s and rainy. Twice a day, the high volume air samplers get filter changes and I caught a couple of pictures over the past week that nicely show the difference:
Tropics vs New England in March [Right Photo by Ben Geyman]
We also felt the edges of the Nor’easters that have hit New England in the past week. For us, this mostly meant waves up to about 25 feet which yielded pitch and roll up to 10-15 degrees and 10m heave at the stern (total motion up and down as the ship passes over a wave). Changing the air filters with that was particularly exciting.
The bow while we’re changing the filters up above the bridge
After five weeks at sea with the same 20 people, we’ve definitely seen some increase in cabin fever, or “cabin” as we prefer to call it. At this point, I know that Rhode Island, Ohio, and many other states have issued stay-at-home orders and a lot of you are probably feeling the same way, though the 185 feet we have may feel luxurious to some of you in your small apartments and homes. Anyway, some of my favorites from the last week include hot sauce ingredient readings at breakfast, searching for the biggest, baddest toaster money can buy, and sieving all our extra mud (we found mostly mud with a smattering of foraminifera and a couple possible worm casts).
We’ve been quite lucky aboard the Endeavor the past few weeks in what seems to be one of the safest spots on the planet at this time. Once we arrive in port, some of us will be headed to our homes in Rhode Island, and others to Massachusetts, Maine, and even Mexico (eventually on that one). As I mentioned last time, it’s been scary watching the news and how fast everything has been changing from out here and, while we would like to get home, it’s scary circumstances to be returning to.
Tomorrow we will land, unload, and head home. I’ll be sure to write an update about that and finishing up the cruise; lots more pictures to share too.
What’s up?