Spice 04 Cruise Seattle-Hawaii-Seattle
A month at sea followed by another month at sea is never easy. But it's a lot easier when your have a good friend nearby. I was lucky enough to have Lora on this cruise with me. We managed to make even the most tedious 10 hour mooring recovery fun and exciting.
Lora has the cook make a huge sheet carrot cake slathered in cream cheese frosting. He decorated with pink roses. We ate it all day long! Melania had sent a card, and Lora had gone around to all of our friends collecting stickers for my truck. I have to say it was one of the best birthday presents ever.
Cruise Report... The Bermuda triangle???!!!
See Photos of this CruiseShortly after the SAIC deployment, we obtained another job with a military contractor. This time it was NavAir. They were even more secretive than SAIC, and had a lot of difficulty communicating their needs to us. We had no idea where the deployment would be, only that it was "offshore Virginia." We would put down instruments, then wait two weeks while other scientists from all over conducted tests, then retrieve our instruments.
This cruise was cursed.. but we didn't know it yet. First Ana Garcia Garcia, our AOA representative wasn't allowed on the ship because she is not an american citizen. They send another geologist rep, but he was too sick to go also. In the end, it was just Garth, Chris and I... not AOA rep to act as a conduit between the Navy folks and us.
When we first arrived, the captain told us that it was possible that we might not be able to hook into their ships transducer. We use the ships transducer to "talk" to the acoustic transponders in our instruments. Although we carry a backup, it's barely powerful enough to reach the 5000m depths we were to deploy in. After many house of playing around with wiring and thinking about the basic electronics and acoustics I knew.. I finally wired it correctly the day of deployment.
Then we found out where we going... the Bermuda Triange.
We spent 20 hours in moderate seas putting the instruments out, and using the transponders to map the locations. The seas were beginning to build, but it still wasn't anything compared to the previous cruise offshore San Diego. Unfortunately I got hit with a flu and was bed ridden for two straight days with a fever. By the third day I was worried that I might need antibiotics, but I started to get better the next morning.
Two weeks of sitting around doing nothing on a tiny little ship is hard enough. But this ship had nothing to it but a galley, lounge and bunks. Nothing. No gym. No library... and there weren't any DVDs to watch. Only VHS tapes of random movies from the 80s. I read through 8 books in no time and watched hours of Sex and the city in my bunk on my laptop. I had to share the room with 3 other women and it was hard getting sleep with everyone tiptoeing around, turning the lights on and off.
During the full moon we began the recoveries. Unfortunately, we could barely communicate with the instruments in the rough seas and deep ocean. We managed to get signals to almost all the instruments to release them to the surface. Unfortunately the NavAir people refused to listen to our instructions and we missed the surfacing of one instrument. In the high winds, it was gone in minutes.
The recovery lasted 50+ hours. I collapsed in the end, having only had 3 one hour naps in that time. I spend 24 hours in bed sleeping and reading. The storm finally overtook us and then next two days, I was imprisoned and miserable.
I couldn't have been happier to get on land. Norfolk, Virginia was a welcome site.
