“You put your fingers in the gills like this and your thumb up on top. Then just rip the head off” John, the 18 year old Palmerstonian with a full, curly black beard, demonstrated the technique on a 12 inch long pink and silver parrot fish. Standing with waves breaking at our knees, Dylan, the engineer, and I tried and failed to repeat the process on two more parrot fish fish caught in the hand-woven net.  Jon came over to show us again. We moved down the net repeating the process as we went.

Dear Reader-

We’ve just passed our halfway day for Stanford@SEA 2017. As a veteran of over 100 oceanographic voyages, some of them nearly 3 months long, I can tell you that such days are always cause for comment and sometimes cause for celebration. The halfway day is most often called “hump day”, suggestive of a certain eagerness to soon be done with the sea and all that voyaging upon it entails. Not so the mood on the Robert C. Seamans.

Our voyage so far has been filled with surreal experiences.  Jumping off the bowsprit into the open ocean and seeing only blue under your feet. Standing fifty feet aloft in the rigging, staring down over everything else. Watching whales surf the waves along our ship.  One of the strangest experiences I’ve had so far, though, hasn’t been any sort of crazy ship shenanigan, but rather involves a certain Canadian TA named Andrew (who may alternatively be referred to as Princess, depending on your willingness to accept the name giving abilities of a six-year-old girl.