Day 24 - DUCK

They did it, they found another morale activity that I can get down for, and it's rubber ducks.

I found this lil guy and I love him, I don't want to give him back, am I the bad guy if I don't return him???

Also I was wrong, they roped me in to two morale events this week. Do I like morale? Yes, but I don't like organized activities. But the second event was watching a movie on the fantail and I absolutely wasn't going to miss that. We watched Grownups, which I wouldn't rank as a very good movie but it was fine. It's another movie where Adam Sandler's character is kind of a jerk and yet he has the absolute hottest wife for some reason (in this case it's Salma Hayek, like be for real)

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/0648b5_56d32d57aa02430ea87c84634c9ce1f6/480p/mp4/file.mp4

I don't have a lot of interesting sampling updates. Yesterdays dive was mostly mud and not a lot of cool critters. They took two more push cores, which I was enthusiastic about at at the beginning of the cruise because I've never seen them before, but they take an eternity to process in the lab and now I'm a little over it. We also get mud everywhere so I'm not looking forward to cleaning at the end of the cruise. But yay science. In my first sciencey job in college, I worked in a plant pathology lab and learned very quickly that field science is mostly just doing dishes. That has been true out here. So. Much. Mud.

But we're trying to get as much done as we can for now, because the weather is about to turn really bad. We're diving today and hopefully again tomorrow (weather permitting) and then will probably just be riding out the storm for a bit. There's a pretty severe weather event moving up from Antarctica, and you know I'm gonna have a bad time. There was also a typhoon (I think near Guam but don't quote me on that) that the Nautilus got stuck in that looked pretty gnarly. So the South Pacific is just a mess right now.

Yesterday was so calm it was almost spooky. I'll leave this here as a reference so you can compare to how bad it gets in a few days:

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/0648b5_a41f617b89fa4ee9950bc8493964968f/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

We're starting to bounce around a bit now but it isn't too bad. Here's the waves today:

And here's the forecast from Thursday onward:

So if I don't post much I promise I'm not dead, I'll just be in bed eating ginger candy and not looking at any screens.