Day ??-19 This is a long one
- Jordan Schweizer
- 10 hours ago
- 3 min read
Okay y'all I know I'm behind, so we're going to do a big catch up today. I counted and today is officially day 19 so I'm going to get back on track with my counting. When I started this blog I thought it would be a bad idea to list the day number in the title because I thought I would lose track. And that's exactly what happened, I know myself. But that means this post will be a bit of a brain dump just to get you caught up, so strap in.
First we discovered that we had a stowaway. We named him Iroh and he is a morning gecko. We planned to release him to land at the end of leg 1 of the cruise, when we will go to port to drop off some people and pick up some new people.
But Iroh was veeery skinny when we found him, and we never found what we wanted to eat. Unfortunately he didn't survive until the boat transfer. I fear we should have left him free range until closwer to the transfer. I found the body. My friend Neah asked if he might just be sleeping, but he was on his back with his little legs sticking up :( It was a real blow to the whole ship. With the vibes being so bad, Iroh was a buoy to morale. I was starting to view him as a son. We had a nice funeral though.
We had sundae Sunday on Sunday, and they have Tillamook ice cream, which has also been a win for me.
On Monday we had more drills, which happen every Monday so you'll hear about it again soon. Pretty uneventful, but it reminded me that I never showed this meme from the laundry room:
We have seen a lot of sharks and whales which is fun. The sharks like to investigate the ROV when it's coming up. I also think they mistake us for a fishing ship, so they follow us thinking they're going to get a snack. The other night at dinner, the bridge piped an announcement that there were whales off the port stern. So everybody was out looking for whales, and in that moment I felt the good vibes of past expeditions where everyone is unified and excited about science. It was brief, but wholesome, and I have a video of a minke whale now:
Let's see what else... We've done some more ROV dives, and we've finally gotten a couple cool things. Mostly we're still out here grabbing nodules which sucks and makes everyone feel really bad. But we got a couple of shark teeth which got everyone super exited. Again, it sparked joy and reminded me of being excited about science. The one pictured they say is definitely a megalodon tooth, and there is another one is probably from a great white.
We also got this little holothurian, and I think he is so cute but a lot of people were kind of weirded out by him:
Some folks were curious about the ROV launching and recovering, so I took some videos. They're kind of long so you don't have to watch if you're not interested, I won't know or care. I'll give a little preamble first though.
The ROV has two parts, the first is Serios (a type of platform called the sled) which is really heavy and hangs directly below the ship. It has some sensors and cameras on it, but it's primary role is to hang there and be stable. Then from Serios is a tether that attaches to the ROV, which is called Deep Discoverer (or D2). This is the platform with all the fancy and expensive stuff, it has tons of cameras, arms to grab samples, bottles to collect water samples, and propulsion to move itself around. But it isn't stable or heavy enough to go down to the deep sea on it's own, so it needs the sled for that.
For recovery, they pick up Serios with the A-frame and lift it up onto the deck:
Then they use a big crane to reach over the side of the ship and pick up D2:
These aren't awesome videos, so if you have questions let me know and I will try to find out.
Here's a silly thing to keep the whimsy alive. All the things you can do with label makers. There are more silly things on the ship, I can show more later, this is just the one I only recently noticed. This is the pump for filtering water samples:
And I can end on a sunset, because I'm trying to spend more time outside both to get more outside time and sunshine and to be away from people:
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