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10/28/05 - Waiting for calm seas |
Thursday night was spent steaming toward Jacksonville, Florida in hopes of finding fairer weather
and calmer seas than were predicted off the coast of Georgia. Calm seas however, were not to be found,
as evidenced by the fact that MT was literally lifted out of bed by the rocking ship! It was so rough
that she could not sleep, and at 5:00 am, she headed to the exercise room, holding onto both sides of
the hallway just to get there! Carefully climbing onto the exercise bicycle that was bolted to the floor,
she pedaled her heart out, feeling just like the wicked witch of the west in the Wizard of Oz who bicycles
through the tornado. Up and down, around and around she went, imagining she was biking over the waves. Thirty
minutes of biking proved enough as she felt her first twinges of seasickness of the trip. A breakfast of Bonine
(motion sickness medicine), plain oatmeal, and water smoothed the chaos of her stomach.
Meanwhile, Doni slept through the roughest part of the seas. Although the 6:00 pm–6:00 am night watch was cancelled in order to steam to the new location, Doni stayed up and assisted with samples from the afternoon dive, answered website questions, transcribed the audio tape from her sub dive the day before, and organized a batch of her students' Styrofoam cups to be shrunk during the next scheduled dive. By 1:30 am, the seas were already quite rough, so she took a Dramamine (her motion sickness cure-of-choice) before bed and didn't wake until 9:00 am.
At 8:30 Friday morning, a science team meeting was called and we were told that no dives would occur that day.
The science team was instructed to tie down all equipment, as rougher seas might lie ahead, and to work on catching
up with data and writing their NOAA Ocean Explorer website logs and research papers. MT spent the morning transcribing
the audio tape from her dive. The transcription will be used by Andrea Quattrini for her research on the habitats and
terrain of the deep ocean.
We are now heading into an area southwest of our North Jacksonville dive site with the hope of finding smoother
seas to rest in while we wait for the sea over our research site to calm down. The ship continues to get jostled around
and waves frequently crash over the open starboard side of the ship, but the sun is shining brightly and the air has warmed.
We hope that the seas will calm and that fair weather will allow dives to resume tomorrow.
10/28/05 - No Data
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