Joke of the watch: What's the difference between a lawyer and a rooster? A rooster clucks defiance.
I just finished reading a good book, _Use of Weapons_ by Iain M. Banks. Besides being a good science fiction story (I read _Against a Dark Background_ on the flight over, it's in the same series) it has an interesting style. It tells two different stories in alternating chapters, one going forward in time, and one going backward in time (filling in parts of the protagonist's background), and the two stories interweave beautifully. Neat.
1200 - 1600 We got a fair amount done this watch, looking at different stuff, until the GPS P-code unit failed again. Uh oh. Although the bridge crew tried to hold position, the ship promptly wandered off like a dog that has slipped its leash. We raised the fish up out of harm's way, hoping that they would be able to fix it. Fortunately, spare parts were brought on the shuttle (I think they said it was the antenna this time), so it was fixed in a hour or so, and it took us another hour to get back on location and settled. Not too bad, all things considered.
Tonight's movie was "K2" which features great cinematography, lots of stunning shots of beautiful mountains, an utterly predictable plot, and lots of macho posturing among the characters. Nuff said.
Willy does not appreciate it when I make Star Trek sound effects while piloting.
We are seeing lots of bentho-pelagic biota (bentho = deep sea bottom,
pelagic = free swimming, biota = life forms). There's a kind of
jellyfish which is completely transparent except for five bright red
stomachs. Another thing looks like a big centipede, and swims with a
serpentine motion of its body, which causes its stiff "legs" to ripple
in waves. There's a creature called a holotherian that looks like a
worm in a baggie. Shrimp with dozens of appendages, and extravagantly
long feelers, go flapping around like they're out of control. Dumbo
octopus (
Galithean crabs are like ghostly white tarantulas with tails. One kind of shrimp is bright red, like a life jacket. There's a kind of squat squid, barrel-fat with a halo of tentacles spread out like an umbrella, which pumps itself along. (Often they go every which way, as if their gyros are out.) Most of these creatures move very slowly, though. Food is scarce, and they need to conserve energy.
Once we saw something extraordinary: a shiny black mass, slowly undulating like a great worm. As near as we can figure, it was a blob of oil from the wreck, acting very strangely under the conditions of temperature (just above 0 Celsius) and pressure (7000 pounds per square inch). But it seemed more alive than much of the biology we've seen!
Another interesting thing to see is the way pipes (like railings, water supply lines, etc) get crushed by the pressure. They look segmented, like link sausages. Douglas Faulkner, one of the assessors (professor emeritus of naval architecture at Glasgow University) explained it to me. Squeeze one end of a cylinder, and the other end squashes in the other direction. As the tube collapses, this happens repeately, and it ends up in flattened orthogonal sections.
I was seized with "cabin fever" again today, really wanting to be somewhere else. I took a walk in as wide a circuit around the ship as I could, then I stood by the railing, gazing out at the infinite sea, trying to feel adventurous and romantic. It didn't work. I just feel like a guy on a boat who wants to go home.
The weather, which has been remarkably nice for a while, calm and sunny, is forecast to get worse as a typhoon comes in from the south. Hopefully it won't interfere with our operations too much, now that we're in the home stretch. My "sea taiji" has been getting better, and now I can actually do most of the moves that require balancing on one leg. That may change if the weather gets rough! This morning Jason was hauled up for maintenance, and was on deck all day, so I didn't have to stand my day watch. Instead, I went to one of the computers, to work on my HTML stuff. After half an hour of sitting there getting nowhere, I punted it and lay in the sun instead, reading a book. Now I feel much better than yesterday! Partly because the book (_China Mountain Zhang_) is about people living and working in really extreme environments, like the Arctic ice cap and terraforming stations on Mars (so that I'm comfortable by comparison), and partly because of being in the sun, but mostly because it's nice to be able to take some time off. I really have been working almost continuously for six weeks now, and in serious need of a break.
This afternoon the deck crew was taking some core samples of the bottom. The sampler is a long length of pipe, maybe three meters long and ten centimeters in diameter, sharpened on one end, and with a fin assembly on the other, so that it looks like a huge dart. They dangle it over the side from a crane (this ship has more cranes and winches than you can shake a stick at) and drop it, let it smack into the bottom, then haul it back up, with the pipe packed full of mud and whatever gunk is down there.
So now Jason has a nice new tether, fixed cameras, and more markers (tassels of yellow rope on shackles, to mark interesting sites). The toilet brush turned out to be so difficult to use that it's been replaced. We now have a wire brush fixed to the basket upright, and a rotary brush with hydraulic power. The vehicle is getting quite crowded!
The weather has been rough all day. For the first time since our transit, I'm seeing water wash over the deck! Part of my day watch was "Z watch" lowering the vehicles to the bottom. During this process, Jason is in "trail position" at the same depth as Medea, getting pulled along backwards by its tether, which isn't too hard on the mechanical connection. Jason even has a "butt cam," a camera facing backwards, so we can watch Medea while trailing.
But in heavy seas, Medea gets pulled up hard by the ship, then dropped so abruptly that it turns on its side until the cable comes taut and yanks it back upright. This is called "snap loading" and is very rough on all the mechanicals. I saw Medea flip almost upside down a couple of times. When we tried to bring Jason below Medea, for operations, the tether was getting savagely yanked, and we spent the rest of the watch in trail position, waiting for the weather to abate. Fortunately, the wind has veered, and even though it's still blowing over 20 knots, it's not blowing with the swells, and the sea is starting to calm down. We are still well ahead of schedule, so no worries.
Joke of the watch: A newly married couple arrives at a hotel, and says they want to rent a suite. The clerk asks, "Bridal?" The woman answers, "Oh no, I'll just hold on to his shoulders till I get the hang of it."
Dinner tonight was like being back in Cambridge: thai chicken in ginger peanut sauce, fried rice, and crab foo yung. I ate like a Vietnamese pot bellied pig, and congratulated all the galley staff on a fine meal. What a pleasure.
Experienced sailors say that sleeping with the motion of the ship causes intense dreams. I have been having nightmares about being in prison, or on the run from a manhunt. Usually very much like an action movie. This morning I woke up with an adrenaline blast hammering my heart. I've also had Ralph (my friend who died at the beginning of the trip) visit me in dreams several times, to hang out, watch Babylon 5, and so on. I hope his family and everybody is okay.
1200 - 1600 This has been the most harrowing watch yet. We spent most of the time on a tall piece of wreckage, bristling with tether-snagging hooks and points like a hellish Christmas tree. The toughest piloting of the mission so far, and Willy and I were both taut as wires. He was getting short with me, which is really unusual! The two video guys exploded into a full scale argument about something else, and traded insults until Willy told them to take it outside. Not good. Tempers are definitely short all around,
The friction is between the two video engineers, Eric and Dave. Eric is the engineer on my watch, and I'll testify that he can be tough to deal with; he means well, but he's astonishingly clueless. "Video Dave" is my roommate, and I think he's a great guy. It's amusing, though, that I have a shelf full of paperbacks and textbooks, without any electronic gear of any kind, and he has a shortwave and a camcorder and loads of other stuff, without a bit of reading material. Sort of an odd couple!
The best part of the day was the dinner barbecue on the fantail. I ate teriyaki marinated tuna, potato salad, deviled eggs, and baked beans until I was ready to bust. I took some potato chips and regular salad, too, but they blew away! (It's been mighty windy for the last several days, probably that typhoon to our south.)
[Morning] There are two pieces of news: the typhoon is headed for us, so the vehicles are being hauled up, and the tether has snapped both the optic fibers (for data and control) and the power lines in the process, so we have to haul up blind. We have had to secure the entire ship for heavy weather. For now, the ship is staying on station, but if the typhoon keeps closing in on us, we will have to run away. Stand by for a rough ride!
During the afternoon, I secured stuff in the lab, and sealed the control van against water and spray. I did this by stuffing the through-holes (where wires and cables pass though) with rags, to absorb any splash, and then wrapping the outside ducts in plastic, wrapped and taped like diapers. That should keep our electronics dry.
Video entertainment was a Nova program, about an attempt to retrieve a B29 bomber abandoned in Greenland, and James Bond "Thunderball" which is good mindless fun.
I spent most of the afternoon working on documentation for the code that I've written; traditionally the most boring part of the job, but necessary. I did manage to do taiji, although the ship was heaving in a pretty major way.
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