First blog for my New Horizon gig (8/31/09)

Tawnya Peterson and Josh Manger discuss a CTD deployment

Sorry for being a bit late in starting my blog for the September New Horizon cruise. It's taken a little while to fall into the groove of shipboard life, but I think we are all grooving along...like Bootsy Collins over a Clyde Stubblefield jam.

So, where are we? The first few days were spent identifying everything we forgot to plan for, then desperately trying to cobble together work-arounds. To be fair, not everyone was operating in this mode, but enough of us were to lend the whole scientific party an air of "why me?"

Natalja Kuvaldina exhausted from focused flow-cam tuning and seasickness

My particular problem was to ensure that the data being generated on the New Horizon made their way to the CMOP database back in Beaverton. This involved a bunch of email back & forths with the CMOP cyber-techs, so progress was limited by internet connectivity -- which is not always guaranteed. We finally got (almost) all the kinks worked out late last night, so be sure to go admire all those beautiful numbers the second you finish reading this blog entry. We passed through some old plume water that was pretty cool. We just happened to hit the Cape Meares Hydroline during some nice, consistent upwelling conditions, so the hydrography was pretty fun to see (for oceanography dweebs, that is).

    
From left to right: Vikki Campbell, Patrick Prahl, Michelle Maier, Morgaine McKibben, Tawnya Peterson, Pete Kahn, Caroline Fortunato, and Vikki again.

The science party is starting to gel, sharing meals and bonding over CTD deployment excitement. I love talking about music, so I had to ask everyone what instruments they play. We've got guitarists, pianists, french horn and english horn players, and...I think Pete said he played trumpet. I played them all a little slide guitar, and wasn't asked to shut up, so I may get to enjoy an audience every now and then on the cruise. Yay!

Being a zoology nut, I like keeping lists of cool animal sightings (and photos too, if I can pull them off). Because the research on this cruise is primarily concerned with organisms smaller than 300 micrometers, I'm not seeing a lot. But what I do see, I will faithfully report in my blog. To date, I've enjoyed waving at, singing to, and occasionally touching:
 

A pair of humpback whales: waved to, and was waved back at

A mola mola: waved to, and it waved back...in its own way

Black-footed albatrosses: sang to, was tolerated

Sea-nettle jellyfish: wanted to eat us! Tried to get onboard by grabbing onto the CTD during a recovery, but its tentacles weren't strong enough and broke off. Dodged that bullet!

Lots of fulmars, shearwaters, petrels and murres: they just ignore me. Probably because I haven't bothered to ID them properly. I need to get on that as soon as we have internet connectivity again.