Hello Loyal Readership of the Corwith Cramer blog,

I am breaking with blogging tradition. I am not going to tell you what I did today, but instead will tell you of my adventures from yesterday! Every day one of the students is assigned to the position of assistant steward, and yesterday, that was me!  Food is very important for the morale of the ship, and having been away from shore for so long, making things delicious is an art.

Read the full voyage blog.

After a week on the RCS we are less than 48 hours from our second port stop at Caroline Island. Even taking an amazing two days to explore Rangiroa and its lagoon, which Andreas described in his blog post several days ago, we’ve adjusted to the rhythm of the watch schedule and life aboard our floating home, lab and classroom. It feels to me like our time on shore was ages ago, much more than the 6 days and change since we left port in Papeete and much much more than two weeks ago we left our long days in the classroom looking out at Monterey Bay (more on that in a minute).

Welcome to one of the best days of my life. Allow me to walk you through it. The day began with a wakeup from Sarah and Lena, both of whom are quite gifted in the art of a “boat wakeup”.

Boat wakeups are used in lieu of alarms on the ship to wake up shipmates before their watch, and therefore have very specific rules and regulations.

Hi all,

This morning I woke up to some cloudy and wet weather with increasing wind and waves. Anthony, Ryan, and I had an eventful morning in lab. We were able to deploy the CTD safely in the swells, CTD stands for conductivity, temperature, and depth and measures salinity, temperature, depth, and dissolved oxygen. I was also able to complete some project work; I identified 16 eels that were caught in last night’s triple stack net tow.

Read the voyage blog for Stanford@SEA.

Stanford@SEA is an exciting biological and oceanographic 16-unit course offered through Biological or Earth Sciences. Half the course occurs at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove; the other half aboard the SSV Robert C. Seamans.

I am so happy to be back at sea and moving again. While Bermuda was amazing, standing on the bow of a ship when it is not moving is just not quite the same. Since being back on the ship we have started up policy classes again with Tiffany and changed the watch officers and assistant scientists assigned to watches. B watch being the designated “weird” watch was so excited to be reunited once again on the ship that we immediately freaked out our new watch officer with our shenanigans.

Good morning, good morning, everybody reading the blog this morning, good morning!

Today was our first official day at sea during the second leg of our journey, and boy I have to say that it feels good to be back at sea. I love and will miss land, but few things truly rival the sight of deep blue all around you, the ships sails full of wind, sunrises over the water, and (for the time being) the gentle rocking of the ship to lull you to sleep – even if you are supposed to be on watch and being attentive.

Hello friends,

As tropical storm Ana gets demoted to “tropical depression” Ana, we set sail from Bermuda and head North (after navigating through safe channels to avoid the reefs – in four centuries, Bermuda has accumulated over 300 shipwrecks!). The extra day at port in Bermuda allowed all groups to get through lab work, which puts us in a much better spot for the second leg of the trip!

Hi everybody,

Today, our departure from Bermuda was delayed due to tropical storm Ana, which is traveling up the east coast of the United States. Captain believes that we will be better off in port tonight, waiting for the storm to move further along its cruise track.  With this delay the group was given a chance to finish up on the preparations need for departure.

It feels as though months have passed since I flew to Tahiti just one week ago. With my friends back at Stanford bogged down with week-six midterms, I thought it couldn’t get much better than living in a bungalow in Moorea and spending my free time exploring the island.  But these last couple of days have proved me wrong.