Today was an exciting day for all aboard the Cramer.  From a scientific standpoint we have entered into the predicted spawning area of the American eel, Anguilla rostrata.

I’m writing from Great Inagua, Bahamas, where the ocean is as blue as a YMCA swimming pool and clear enough to see 33.2 feet below. The new watch schedule has been a tough adjustment; for me, the most challenging part of being underway is the cyclical nature of the days. Thankfully today was about as blissful and unpredictable as I could’ve imagined.

Here we are, on the last leg of our long journey through PIPA! Woot! We’re almost there. Destination: American Samoa. We’ve conducted SO much research and data sampling to add to a fantastic data set in these remote parts of the world. Pretty sweet as.

Our students have learned the ship and are beginning to take on the responsibilities as junior watch leaders.

Hello everyone, it is I, Nate Johnson, back to bring you another blog post!

As we sail further from Orona, the ocean around us begins to grow and consume the horizon once more.

We, class S-278, have reached our final day here on the SSV Robert C. Seamans. And what a day it has been! This morning, we anchored in Moorea, an island so insanely beautiful it adorns the French Polynesian currency. After a long day of scrubbing the boat, we were rewarded with a swim call. Amongst the stark mountains and intermittent downpour, our lives hardly felt real.

And that has been a common theme throughout this trip — beauty, emotions, and experiences that are so rich and complex that they defy reality itself.

We are currently anchored outside of Navassa Island, which is an interesting geological feature: a plateau of limestone with eroded cliffs that meet the sea. The island is covered in shrubbery, and from the boat we could see the remains of an old stone road, and some building ruins.

As we make our way closer to Auckland, some signs that this trip will end are unfortunately starting to appear. Science deployments and data collection have tapered off, the stresses of project work are in full swing, and I’m hearing conversations about life after the trip.

I’m reluctant to mention any of this at all because time might catch wind of it and might tick by faster-which would be cruel.

A couple of weeks ago, Steve, the third scientist excitedly told me to grab my camera and come to lab-there was a lens they thought might work to photograph samples under the microscope. With a little puttering and a lot of knob turning, the eerie space ship bodies of the dinoflagellates and copepods began to come into focus.

There’s a handful of thoughts the novice sailor finds themselves pondering every day. How much sleep could I get if I fell asleep right now? God, it’s hot/wet/smelly. What’s for snack? I can’t believe I’m doing this right now. It’s that last one that I found myself thinking a lot today.

Today was our weekly field day, which for A Watch meant the beloved galley cleansing.

I knew something extraordinary was going to happen today. After five weeks, we’ve gotten into a definite rhythm of life on the ship. There’s the 18 hour cycle of being on and off watch, there’s the three day rotation of different watches, and there are all the tasks that need to be done every hour, on the hour, every hour of the day. It’s easy to get caught up in the cycle, and time has seemed to pass quicker and quicker the longer we’ve been on this ship.  But then, there are afternoons like this one that break the rhythm, bring us all together, and remind us how precious our time aboard the ship is.