Daily Journal

July 7, 2010

By David M. Lawrence

About 0530 hours, shortly after our early morning station, we began our last leg south.

The expedition is winding down. We'll be cutting back on our sampling efforts, possibly with our last Tucker trawls tomorrow. So far, we've done more than 100 stations – more than 100 neuston tows and surface stations, dozens of Tucker trawls, hundreds of weather and sea state observations, hours of plastic observations, tens of thousands of pieces of plastic debris collected, and more than ten thousand zooplankton counted in dozens of 100 counts.

We will still have a lot to do, though. Much of the chlorophyll and seawater nutrient analyses remain to be done on samples we've already collected. And much of the microbial research will have to wait until the ship returns to its home port in Woods Hole, Mass. The ship still has to be sailed, maintained, and cleaned. It's been our home for weeks, and we can't afford to neglect it now.

The past couple of days, we had been motor-sailing northward toward the thirty-second parallel – the line of latitude we followed out from Bermuda. We had avoided using the engine since June 21, but on the lastest northward leg, we ran into unfavorable winds and had to start the engine on Monday.

Most of us prefer sailing to motoring. It's a lot quieter, for one, and cooler – especially in the ship's library where I now write, which is next to the engine room. Plus, though there's more physical labor involved with sailing, there's something special about sailing that I wish I could explain. Prior to this expedition, I was full of romantic notions of what it was like to sail a tall ship. Some of that romance has been replaced by the reality of Winston Churchill's words, "blood, toil, tears, and sweat," but a deeper, more solid romance remains.

I still feel like I'm not explaining this very well. Maybe one day the right words will find me, but right now I can't find them.

As for some of the toil, C Watch pulled off an incredible feat on morning watch (0700 to 1300 hours): one carousel deployment, three Tucker trawls, and two neuston tows (one conducted simultaneously with two of the Tucker trawls). It closed with a mad rush of sail handling, trying to get it all done before turnover with A Watch on afternoon watch. We left them the tops'l, which isn't bad considering everything we had to do.

(Full disclosure, I wasn't helping much with that last round of sail handling, as I was recording it for a possible radio project in the future.)

We've seen more Sargassum weed in the northern portions of our expedition track than in the southern portions. In the first neuston tow of morning watch today we pulled up a good bit of Sargassum along with a special find, another Sargassum fish. The fish is part of a floating ecosystem that uses floating mats of one or both of the two species of Sargassum, S. natans and S. fluitans, for food, shelter, nurseries, and more. The Sargassum fish is usually small, but nevertheless is rather spectacular in the way that it has adapted to its natural surroundings. Its coloration – brown and tan blotches similar to desert camouflage uniforms – well mimics the coloration of floating Sargassum. Its fins that end in what appear to be spike-like branches, mimic the structure of Sargassum weed. By blending in so well with its seaweed surroundings, the fish is hard to spot by its predators or, in some cases, by humans.

A Watch was busy during afternoon watch having to do much of the analysis of what we collected in the morning. After class it had its own deployments to manage. And B Watch, on evening watch, is doing its own deployments as I write the final lines of this journal entry.

I stepped out for about half an hour for star frenzy. I shot four stars, but since I couldn't identify the last one I shot, I reduced the sights for the first three and calculated – and plotted! – a celestial fix on our chart. Our GPS said we were at 30°56.1'N x 54°07.0'W. I obtained a fix of 30°57.6'N x 54°14.3'W. I'm off by a bit, but I don't think I'm off by much.

In less than two hours, C Watch steps up for midwatch. I won't have time to sleep before then, but maybe I'll have time for a shower. I could use one.

P.S. Happy birthday, mom. I'm having fun out here.

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For more from sea, listen to an interview with Chief Scientist Giora Proskurowski on the July 2, 2010 Science Update podcast, produced by AAAS.