Well, here we are sailing (and rolling) along under the full stack and mainstays’l, with Ile Rapa faded into the distance behind us and our sights set to our next stop: Raivavae. The transit from New Zealand has been exciting, rewarding, and even a little stressful at times, but overall the ship’s company is in good spirits.

Greetings from San Juan Puerto Rico,
Class C-259 and the Marine Biodiversity & Conservation semester course has begun aboard the Corwith Cramer. All of our staff and students have safely arrived at the ship and are settling into life onboard. We will stay docked overnight in Old San Juan and get underway on Tuesday April 21st, bound for the Sargasso Sea & eventually Bermuda, 900 nautical miles to the North.

There aren’t many perfect days in life, but living aboard the Robert C. Seamans certainly provides opportunities a plenty. On land, one might not usually associate being woken up at 0230 by a friend whispering your name and giving you a brief weather report with a good day, but after you groggily put your harness on and stumble onto deck, the first thing that greets you is a night sky full of stars.

One of my favorite stories of exploration is that of Ernest Shackleton, who sailed to Antarctica three times in the early 20th century in an attempt to lead the first team to the true South Pole. On his final voyage, Shackleton’s ship became stuck in the sea ice, and hope of making it home safe seemed all but lost. But Shackleton knew that survival was possible, and successfully led every single man out of the Antarctic ice alive.

I would like to dedicate this blog post to the parents of the students and staff on board.  I am the Steward on the RCS and I have the amazing opportunity to spend one on one time cooking with each of the students. Some of my favorite questions to ask them are about their cooking experiences, where they learned, what they grew up eating, and what their parents are like.  I know my own love of cooking, as well as many others’, started by watching and helping their parents.

To mark Undergraduate Research Week, we’re continuing to feature the inspiring investigations planned by our current class on campus, C-259, Marine Biodiversity & Conservation. (In case you missed it, here are Part 1 and Part 2.)

In just a few days, they’ll set sail from San Juan, Puerto Rico to New York City via Bermuda. Along the way, they’ll undertake a variety of scientific studies on the Sargasso Sea, that vast portion of the North Atlantic Ocean that is a major focus of conservation efforts.

Here’s a look at the final two projects that our student research teams plan to conduct:

The students of C-259, Marine Biodiversity & Conservation, will join the SSV Corwith Cramer in San Juan, Puerto Rico, by April 20th. They will be back on campus in Woods Hole, MA to finish their program with a symposium, on June 12, 2015.

Greetings and Salutations!

Things continue heating up on the Robert C. Seamans, both literally as we creep toward the tropics, and figuratively as our science project deadlines loom and we approach the end of the ominous-sounding “Shadow Phase” and the beginning of slightly sillier sounding, but much more stressful, JWO/JLO phase. (More as it develops.)

The abundance of plastic debris in our world’s oceans has become increasingly well documented, thanks in part to decades of intensive data collection by SEA scientists and SEA Semester students. But determining just how much plastic has entered the ocean, and where it all goes, remains a challenge.

A new study co-authored by Dr. Kara Lavender Law, SEA Research Professor of Oceanography, sheds new light on one piece of this puzzle: Can plastics from the bellies of deceased seabirds provide an accurate sense of pollution levels in a given ocean environment?

Another lovely day under sail.  Thanks to a little help in the form of wind from a low pressure system to the south, we were able to shut off the old ‘iron sail’ (the engine) for most of the day today.  Although as Assistant Engineer this piece of equipment is fairly central to my role here, I much prefer the sound of the wind in the rigging to the rumble of cylinders.