I am SO happy I won't have to sit in an airplane any more. Even with a collar pillow, it's torture after the first couple hours. The final leg was my first time on a 747, which is a nice airplane, there's more room to move around. This one included a nifty feature: a video display showing a map with the flight route, a little icon for the airplane's current location, distance to landmarks (which were all islands with names I know only from history books, Wake, Truk, Midway etc). Also numeric distance traveled, still to go, time at destination, and even outside temperature (which dropped from 85 F at sea level to -40 at 35000 feet, wow!) My head is still congested, which makes altitude changes pretty painful, with weird sharp sinus pains on descent.
I got some sleep in the air, not much. I'm avoiding caffeine and alcohol, and eating only very lightly, in hopes of minimizing jet lag. Anyway, after all that, we arrived in the humid heat of Guam, check into the hotel (after straightening out my reservation, which they never did find) and crash out!
Guam has an interesting blend of cultures. The local people are Chamorro, one of the peoples of Micronesia (culturally distinct from Polynesia to the east and Melanesia to the south) who look a lot like Central American Indians, broad-faced, friendly folk with skin the color of an old penny. As Guam is a US territory, English is the official language, and US dollars are the currency. Official signs, license plates, and so on proudly proclaim "Guam USA." The tourist money, though, is Japanese. The hotel, in fact the whole resort area of Guam, is crawling with Japanese tourists, almost all young couples on vacation. Also there is a lot of Filipino influence, so there is some Spanish spoken and on billboards, and Catholic churches abound. Finally, there is a small but vigorous Jamaican influence, mostly among the black people. So it's quite a mix.
Turns out the Seventh Fleet has come into port here for the weekend, and won't be leaving until tomorrow. This is a carrier battle group (the carrier USS Independence with maybe a dozen support ships). What this means is, our ship (the RV Thomas G Thompson) can't dock until they leave. So it won't be arriving until tomorrow, and that means we get a free day.
I spent the morning snorkeling in the lagoon in front of our hotel. $10 rental for mask, snorkel, booties, and a packet of fish food, and I spent $5 extra for fins. Even though it's a sheltered lagoon, this is the Pacific Ocean we're talking about, and the gigantic waves breaking beyond the reefs cause a powerful current. When it surges, it's all I can do to hold position, swimming at full strength with fins and everything.
The lagoon is a patchwork quilt of reefs, sandy patches, and volcanic boulders like hard black sponge. There is an amazing variety of corals, from fields of spiky tree branches in orange and brown, to purple brains as big as truck tires, to blobs of greenish stuff, covered in the finest hair that ripples in the current like fields of grain in the wind.
There are lots of fearsome looking sea urchins, with foot long black spines. Many of them have intense blue or indigo marking on the shell, bright as day-glo neon. They can move their spines, and often point their spines at me when they perceive me getting close. They tend to sit in clusters under coral overhangs.
The lagoon floor is littered with sea slugs, or sea cucumbers, or similar things. Some are covered with sand, and just look like gritty blobs. Others are like black elephants' trunks, with little feeler palps around the mouth end. Some are leopard spotted brown, and look exactly like our garden slugs, only as big as my forearm.
A local kid came by, using a little motorized thing to tow him around, and handed me a pillow starfish. It's orange, and looks like a fat sea urchin without spines (cantalope size), and feels hard at first, but then moulds to the pressure of my fingers. He said they're rare and expensive, but I found another on my own, a little later.
I found another kind of starfish, that I thought at first was a blue neoprene glove lost by a diver. Five fat fingers, maybe reaching a foot across, as blue as any plastic. It didn't react much when I picked it up, just hung out, slowly twisting. Wild.
There are lots of fish. Squadrons of silvery needle-nosed gar things hanging just below the surface, clown colored parrotfish (less than a foot long, much smaller than the ones in Mexico), boxy puffers waggling their metronome tails, zebra striped tetras. There are clouds of finger length fellows with the most amazing color scheme: viewed head on, they're intense neon blue, but from the rear, the color fades to dull turquoise, about the same color as the water, which may make them harder to see when fleeing predators. Amongst the tree branch "forests" of coral are red finned panfish and tiny brown trout, the size of a sparrow, that stick their heads out and stare at me open-mouthed.
When the larger waves came by, I heard a strange booming roar. It took me a while to figure out what causes it. The tree coral is not all attached; many pieces are looose and free to move, although interlocked. The waves make them grind and rub against each other.
After the swim, I dried off among the Japanese girls in bikinis. (They demurely hide their smiles behind their hands, when I catch them looking at me, or they catch me looking at them.) I met some of the guys, and we went for a drive around the island.
The southern half of Guam takes 2-3 hours to drive around. This is a very different place from the hotel zone. Villages of native people interspersed with lots of pristine coastline.
Since it's Sunday, lots of local folk are out partying and enjoying the fine weather (sunny, high 80s). We ate lunch at a gorgeous beach, lots of local kids surfing, playing football, and hanging out. They're very friendly, and some came by to chat with us. We drove by several local villages, which generally remind me of Mexico. The village of Umatac was having a big fiesta type gathering and celebration, where the main attraction turned out to be a cockfighting tournament!
After all that driving, we were tired and thirsty, so we headed to Guam's sole microbrewery, called Pacific Universal Brewing (P.U.B.) which serves four German style beers: pale, doppel, hefeweisen, and martzen (which was my favorite, balanced like a light ale). Kind of a fun place, although quite expensive, like most restaurants in Guam that cater to Euro-Americans ($20 - $30 for dinner is typical).
Another Japanese buffet breakfast at the hotel. Today Jon (my boss) and Steve (my senior peer) and I decided to go for a hike. We got some directions from the dive rental guy, and tried to follow them, but we couldn't seem to find exactly what he was talking about. We did find a good trail at Sella Bay (about 1 hour south of the hotel zone) and hiked from the road, which is high up the mountainside, down to the beach and back.
At the top, the trail is bare, packed red clay, amongst tall scraggly grass and scrub brush, like a Southwestern arroyo. As you descend, the brush gets thicker, and low scrambling vines appear, including small morning glories. In the valley, you suddenly enter bamboo thickets around a little stream, which give way to a dense palm jungle. Lots of coconuts have fallen and sprouted all over the place. Blue and black butterflies abound. There are tiny darting lizards, which may be geckos or something similar, that move so fast and abruptly they seem like insects. All the plants are huge; many palm leaves are bigger than the bed I sleep on.
The jungle hugs the beach, so that the ocean is framed in classic swaying palm trees. The beach area is swarming with hermit crabs, thousands of them, that make a constant clicking noise like falling rain. We called them "kaneechas" because we figured if you're wounded and unable to get away, they can eat ya!
The hike back up was hard. Again, the weather was tropical, sunny, high 80s, and humid. We tried to imagine doing this hike fifty years ago, wearing full combat gear and boots, carrying M1 rifles, and carrying heavy packs, with Japanese snipers shooting at us. Not at all a pleasant prospect.
We had lunch in a Vietnamese place off the main road. Good food, especially the lumpia (uncooked spring rolls). This is fairly close to the naval port, which is obvious from the large number of bars, strip clubs, and massage parlors along the main road. We did see several of the girls looking very tired, since the Seventh Fleet just left!
Finally, the ship was ready to dock. We swung by a grocery store and picked up a case of beer, and brought it to the dock, arriving just as they were tying up. It took an hour or so for the ship to clear customs, and then we had a good little party in the parking lot. It's good to see Will (my brother in law) again, and all the science team and ship's crew are very happy to be ashore.
After the welcoming blast, most of them went off to do some more serious drinking. I went with a gang to the Lone Star, a Texas restaurant. Almost all the food is beef, but they do have grilled mahimahi (the fish that used to be called "dolphin" but no relation to the cetacean) so I had that. I'm not a big fan of Texas in general, but it was kind of cute to see the waitresses decked out in their country western gear. Every night at 8:00 they dim the lights and the staff does a dance (the song is some country R&B staple, and the only line I remember is "Sometime's you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug.") Cute.
The ship is really interesting, I will describe it later when I have more time.
In the afternoon we had a small emergency in the lab: the air conditioning went off, and the lab went from chilly (maybe 55 F and dry) to sweltering (85 F and very humid) very quickly. Massive condensation appeared on the monitors, and we ran around like crazy shutting the machines down.
So when the air conditioning came back on, Jon fired up one of the PCs, and it had frotzed its video. We decided it's much better to let them sit awhile, make sure all the condensation is gone, before starting them up again. Caveat hackor!
Dinner at a Mexican restaurant, soft veggie tacos, very good.
Today I worked on the sonar sled, aligning the transducers and adjusting their beam angle. Then we put the "fish" in the water and I got trained on the sonar watch station. At this point, it's mostly babysitting during the tests, in case anything goes wrong. Today, first a big hunk of junk (some rusty old metal thing) came floating by, and the local Coast Guard had to send a tug to haul it away, and then our ship had to be moved down the dock to make room for another ship. Both times, I had to shut down the sonar so they could haul the fish out of the water.
Dinner at the Pizza Hut on the naval base, good pie, but expensive.
This afternoon we put Jason in the water for the first time, to test the new cameras and stuff. I feel for the vehicle crew; they've been working like maniacs, even harder than I have, to get all this stuff ready. Everyone was psyched to see the video systems working.
At 7:00 pm local time, we were scheduled to move the ship over to the fueling station, across the harbor, which takes an hour or so. I made plans to go to dinner with some of the guys while this was happening. Around 6:45, I suggested we get off the ship, and they said there was still plenty of time. Then came the "all ashore that's going ashore" announcement, and by the time we got to the gangplank, the crew was just pulling it in. Gah. So, being stuck on the ship now, I went to the forward deck to watch as we crossed the harbor in the darkening sunset. Beautiful rainbows stretched from horizon to horizon as rain squalls blew through.
By the time the ship tied up at the fueling dock, it was 9:00 and the others said it was too late to go for dinner. So I managed to get a ride with Dana (one of the scientists, a great guy) to the Seamen's Club on the base, where we got some cheap beers. I rounded up Dave (my roommate) and Budda (one of the crew) and persuaded them to go out for Thai food. They were reluctant, but by the time we were finished with lumpia, chicken ginger stirfry, shrimp soup, and lots more, they were sold! They want to get the same food tomorrow.
Spent all day learning the sonar post processing system, and I finally feel like I've got a handle on it. Got all the lab equipment and computers tied down with cords and bungees (everything has to be secure by tomorrow, we leave at noon). Got most of the packing boxes and crates stowed in the rear hold (I ended up directing the crew members who came to help). I think we're ready to sail.
Final dinner ashore was tonight. I took Dana and Tim to the brewpub, and enjoyed a few last beers. They seemed to like it. Our shuttle driver (Rafia) had brought his adorable little daughter along (Christina, who's "almost seven") and she chatted up a storm all the way there, singing hymns out a little church book.
This page maintained by Wil Howitt