Pull in the gangplank and hoist the sails! Today we pulled away from the dock in St. Croix and plunged straight into our voyage to San Juan (with a lovely stop in the British Virgin Islands only days away). However, adjusting to life on the high seas came with its own unique challenges. Many struggled with seasickness, some struggled with coiling heavy ship line, and everyone struggled with staying cool in the bright Caribbean sun.

In the morning we picked up anchor outside of Petit Rameau and motored on over to an anchorage outside Canouan to clear customs. After that, we motored away from Canouan and set the sails for the first time in several days – It’s great to be underway again. Not too much is happening now, so let me tell you a tale about science.

Picture this: It’s a beautiful evening in lab, and you’re hard at work taking measurements.

Late last night, at approximately 2300, we entered PIPA, and after sailing through PIPA for over twelve hours the ocean still looks pretty much the same as it has for the past week.  It looks so similar because PIPA is actually significantly larger that it appears on maps, and a majority of this area is open ocean.  Due to the Mercator effect, which is the warping of a sphere when applied to a flat surface – such as a map –, the areas near the pole appear larger in relation with the areas near the equator.

I started the day off with watch from 0700 to 1300 with C-Watch. I noticed that my nausea and sea-sickness has moderated after being pretty miserable the day before. The other main observation I made was that my present sense of comfort was in large part due to the fact that the ship was not going anywhere. The sails were set so the ship was hove to, or effectively stopped for science. For this reason heaving to is my favorite sailing position thus far! Plus, it allows for the deployment of the scientific equipment onboard; extra, bonus for me since I was scheduled to be in the lab with two of my shipmates.

We forwent our regularly scheduled science stations yesterday. Instead of dropping our Secchi disk, free CTD, phyto net, and Neuston net in the morning, we charged forward, making miles early so that we could spend an extra few hours with science gear overboard in the afternoon and evening.

We sailed towards the Mid-Atlantic Ridge’s western side from the heart of its rift valley, a tight and narrow topographic feature bounded by almost incomprehensively steep, deep cliffs that plunge over two thousand meters vertically in a mere hundred horizontal meters. We sailed west, and set our sights toward an elusive shallow spot called Researcher’s Ridge.

Hello to all the readers of the C256 blog! This is Nick Dragone, one of the two visiting scientists on this= transatlantic crossing. I am onboard to work on a collaborative project studying the microbial communities living on marine plastic debris. After reading this blog post, I hope you will understand a little more about the collaborative ship-wide effort that is required every day to perform the research that I, Annie (my fellow visiting scientist), the students, and the faculty are conducting onboard.