Yuckamuck

Things are going pretty smoothly now that we're out to sea. (There aren't even any hurricanes breathing down our neck.) I've taken on some additional duties, sampling water at the various stations and depths our program requires. Sampling isn't really my strength. I discovered an uncanny talent in college chemistry class (I was pre-med for all of one year, like half of all incoming freshmen) for finding the critical step of any experiment, and screwing it up.

So it was with some reluctance that I agreed to help now, but it would hardly be team playing to refuse. Besides, hours of work are better than hours of idleness (at least, most of the time). But then, I wasn't thinking ahead to a night like tonight, when we shifted all the refrigerated samples into ice-filled chests for transfer to another boat, which will ferry them to shore, whence they'll be brought to the lab for analysis.

All that sounds a bit whimsical but these water samples are the foundation for almost all the scientific work now going on here. Simply put, the remote sensing and nearly all the instruments mean nothing without the water samples to correlate to. Just like with sidescan sonar, you can't confidently interpret seafloor without samples, or some kind of independent knowledge of what's down there. Tens of thousands of samples have been taken all over the northern Gulf this summer. Those samples are the concrete, the rock on which any subsequent scientific structure will be built. More than ever before, this area has become America's marine laboratory.

So it's been a surprisingly long and annoying day, with hauling huge coolers around, loading them with ice, carefully packing the bottles, making sure that the bottles match the packing list, sighing off on everything, and then taping the coolers shut. All told it was nearly four hours' work, and by the end I was getting ready to bark at someone, just out of frustration. (I didn't, but I wanted to.)

So the rendezvous boat came, we gave them our coolers full of bottles, and they're gone. And now I'm going to sleep myself. But not before posting a few photos!

The double-bladed moon is the result of my shaking hands, but I like the effect.


I love my hard hat.