{"id":203,"date":"2011-01-14T15:57:15","date_gmt":"2011-01-14T19:57:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/colbyatsea\/?p=203"},"modified":"2011-01-16T06:51:47","modified_gmt":"2011-01-16T10:51:47","slug":"%e2%80%9ci-must-go-down-to-the-seas-again%e2%80%9d-my-first-few-days-at-sea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/colbyatsea\/2011\/01\/14\/%e2%80%9ci-must-go-down-to-the-seas-again%e2%80%9d-my-first-few-days-at-sea\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cI Must Go Down to the Seas Again\u201d: My First Few Days at Sea"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Whenever I\u2019m near the ocean, a poem by John Masefield comes to mind, “I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied.”\u00a0 I have always loved the sea and felt drawn to it.\u00a0 What I\u2019m learning now aboard the Melville is about life at sea<\/em>, which is vastly different from that on land for several reasons.<\/p>\n

Firstly, time is an interesting concept aboard the Melville.\u00a0 Throughout the course of the trip, we will travel through five<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>different time zones.\u00a0 Time of day is irrelevant to research aboard the ship and data is collected at all hours.\u00a0 For example, CTD (Conductivity, Temperature, Depth) casts are deployed at all hours of the day, whether it be 0300 or 1630, and deployment requires both a team to operate the equipment, and people to run tests once water samples have been collected.\u00a0 I am working with three other people on a research team with Barney Balch, a Senior Scientist at Bigelow.\u00a0 The members of our team divide our time into shifts and I am responsible for working 1400-0200.\u00a0 As a morning person, this requires some adjustment of my sleep schedule, but that\u2019s part of life at sea, and it can be exciting deploying equipment overboard in the dark.\u00a0 Although it may seem odd that our staterooms don\u2019t have any windows in them, this is useful when I finish my shift and go to sleep \u201cfor the night\u201d at 0200.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The sounds aboard a ship also differ from those on land.\u00a0 There is always a source of white noise aboard the Melville, whether it is from the engine, scientific equipment that\u2019s running, or waves hitting the boat.\u00a0 The Melville has a unique occurrence known as the \u201cMelville shake,\u201d which feels like the boat is bouncing on the water for several seconds, and at first I thought might be caused by some sort of equipment malfunction on the ship.\u00a0 The shake is actually due to the 30 feet that were added to the Melville during renovations years ago, which altered the boat\u2019s balance so that when the thrusters are in a particular position, the boat smacks against the waves causing a shake.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Being awake and fully functional at all hours of the day and hearing things in my dresser move side to side as I fall asleep are becoming the norm.\u00a0 I\u2019m even getting better at reading the meniscus in a graduated cylinder while the ship is rolling.\u00a0 It\u2019s only day 4 of our cruise, and I can\u2019t wait to see what more the next 32 days have to teach me about life at sea.<\/p>\n

-Annie<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whenever I\u2019m near the ocean, a poem by John Masefield comes to mind, “I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide is a wild call and a clear call that may not be … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1673,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17554,17553,1178,17552,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/colbyatsea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/colbyatsea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/colbyatsea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/colbyatsea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1673"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/colbyatsea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/colbyatsea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":223,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/colbyatsea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions\/223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/colbyatsea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/colbyatsea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/colbyatsea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}