April 11th
Ever been in a situation where you
are given something to eat, you have no idea whatsoever what it is, but you eat
it anyway because the alternative is to go hungry? No? Well I have. lol. God alone knows whatever it was that the chef gave me last night. I know it may seem like
I've been talking a lot about the food but honestly I've come to dread meal times
a little. To me, a lot of the food is quite salty, even the veggies, so I feel
my stomach isn't quite happy about some of the changes. I realized something
else was wrong, because I wasn't seasick anymore, but I still felt
uncomfortable at times. I've now learned what to avoid eating ( I KNEW the food
had something to do with it!) and that has made a huge difference in how I feel
in general.
Finally got some good weather again
so I took the chance to do some laundry. Yay fresh clothes!!! I had hand washed
some in the meantime, but hanging them up in my room was no good. Hanging them to
dry on the lines on one of the decks is so much better!
Today a lot of time was spent trying to recover a piece of
equipment that had been deployed to the sea floor on a previous leg of the
cruise. It's supposed to come back to the surface once it receives an acoustic
signal from the ship. Supposed to.... Put it this way, they started looking for
it at about midday, and at 8 pm it still hadn't been recovered. Lost cause for
tonight, hopefully it turns up early tomorrow.
April 12th
Finally got around to snapping the
cat! He's gotten very bold now. At first he just used to stay on the decks, but
now he's making himself comfortable inside more often. Here he's in the
computer lab rubbing up on one of the seats. They better hope he doesn't have
any fleas!
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| Brazen Kitty |
Today is
more or less the half way point! Yippee!! I'm grateful to be here, and I love
the sea, but I'll be happy when I'm back on land. Hardcore mariner I am not. It's
all fine and dandy during the good days, but during bad weather?.... Another
story entirely. I've been told that this weather is on the milder side of what
the ocean can really get up to at times out here.
I was speaking to one of the
officers and he's usually at sea for around 260 days of the year....
260/365..... I know I couldn't do it. He told me he tells himself that he's
strong. For some of the scientists, this is their second consecutive leg.
One of the
things that has been a huge change is the isolation. With no internet, there is
really no way of keeping up with the world at the level I'm used to. News?
Google? hah! Social Media? - What's that again? There are so many little things
we take for granted. Something occurred
to me randomly one day and I wanted to double check it. Usually Google would be
my friend in this case, but nope, none of that here. Granted, even if we did
have the internet, this is a Chinese vessel, so some things would probably have
been blocked anyway. You also realize that there are many people who live like
this all the time. That is, in blissful ignorance of what's really going on,
and not just those on ships in the middle of nowhere.
Speaking of the middle of nowhere,
it occurred to me the other night that if anything really serious were to
happen, we'd be in serious trouble. let me show you were we were...
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| Location of the South West Indian Ridge (SWIR) |
