Florida State University : Research in Review

Day 7 - Friday, 09/19/08

Position 11:33 local: N42 25.268 W131.34.025

Since about 6:30 this morning, we’ve been under way, on a course of 120 degrees at a bit over 8 knots. After making five excellent casts (after three successive busts), science chief Thistle said “enough” and gave Capt. Jeff thumbs up to head to the next station.

Capt. Jeff was all smiles at the wheel this morning. He gazed out across an unbelievably pacific Pacific, bathed this morning in a dazzling sun and with not a ship in sight, even on the radar. He was happy the science crew had gotten what they came to this far-flung corner of this vast place for. A big part of his job is to do everything he can to make sure that the people who hire the Point Sur leave Moss Landing with good things to say. It’s obvious to everybody aboard that Capt. Jeff is serious about this aspect of his job. He’s mindful that the stunningly benign seas are playing a major role in this mission’s success so far. A forecast calling for no more than 20-knot winds for the next 24 hours sweetens our prospects.

Think of a bagpipe stuck on a G chord. Now think of the noise amped to rock concert levels. Now imagine trying to sleep in a rolling bunk with that cacophony pounding your plugged ears nonstop for two hours or more at a stretch. That’s life aboard the Sur when she’s in the process of putting a multi-corer contraption on the seafloor two miles down.

The incessant racket comes from the ship’s main winch, which holds nearly three miles of half-inch steel cable. Mounted slightly forward of amidships just below the bridge—and not more than 25 feet from my pillow—the winch is literally this mission’s lifeline. If anything happens to it, the mission will have to be scrubbed. There are two other winches on board, but none are set up to do what this one does, or has anything approaching its muscle—this brute could pull a 10-ton locomotive off its tracks.

Gabe (actually, Randy Gabrielson), the ship’s grizzled chief engineer who Moss Landing called out of retirement just for this mission, said the winch “complains a lot” mainly because she’s old. It’s been on the ship longer than he has—22 years. Gabe explained that the noise comes from two sources—the device’s hydraulic controls and its aging gear-box. The winch sings one chord letting line out, another hauling line in. Even semi-comatose at 4 a.m., it’s easy to tell exactly when the winch switches gear—the whine shifts into a higher octave and gets even louder. Even the best earplugs and so-called noise-cancelling head phones, which I thoughtfully packed for this trip, offer little relief during a cast, which in these depths typically lasts two hours or more. None aboard likes the noise, but all seem to have reconciled it as one of the costs of doing this kind of exotic business at sea. We’re looking forward to the prospects of today’s 32-hour transit to our next waypoint, hoping it will give our taxed ear pans time to recover. But Capt. Jeff warns that Gabe plans some maintenance on the winch en route. Under Florida-type skies and plying three-foot seas, the good ship Point Sur may soon be resonating with an all-too-familiar tune. Can’t wait!

Today, the only people busy in the lab were Allison and Sam. At around 7 this morning, they recovered another CTD sampling of seawater, and they’ve spent much of the day running it through phytoplankton-catching filters.

The rest of the crew took advantage of the down time to relax and recharge their batteries. Lots of reading and nap-taking as the Sur plowed its way under mostly cloudy skies toward its next stop, which will take us to within 70 miles of shore this time, and, we hope, another connection to the Internet. Living in a news black-out is probably good for the soul, but it gets lonely. I think of my daughter and my dog back in Tallahassee and wonder wistfully if either has forgotten me.

A short study of the nautical chart in the wheelhouse—and on my handheld GPS—reveal that we have passed 20 or so miles to the S-SE of one of this area’s many named seamounts. These are sudden, often dramatic rises in the seafloor, possibly drowned islands. The chart showed this area virtually dotted with them, some rising to within 600 meters of the surface from the abyssal plains we now traversed. The one nearest us is named Iizuka Seamount. Just northwest of it lies Schaefer Seamount. A curious series of mounts northeast of us is called President Jackson Seamounts. How and when these natural curiosities got their names may now be a forgotten part of this vast region’s sea lore.

High recreation on the stern late this afternoon. A tuna stripped all the line (300 yards) from my reel, which I’d left unattended to go eat an entire plate of Chef Karen’s superb Caesar salads, but was still on—my 80-lb monofilament line turned out to be well tied to the reel! Sitting in the galley, Jack came to my rescue and shouted to Capt. Ken to back off on the throttles a bit. I proceeded to essentially winch a tired, six-pound albacore to the landing net. My first albacore! Jack snapped a picture, just before two of his hand lines jerked violently. He not only missed both fish, he came back with snapped leaders. Big fish were on the prowl! Unfortunately, we didn’t hook into any more of that caliber before calling it quits as night fell. Jack did put another fine albacore aboard, as did Andrew fishing from the starboard.

A funny thing: Jack and Gabe caught two small tuna that hit at the same time and had them flopping on the deck. Andrew quickly identified them as false albacore tuna, not worth eating. He instructed me to throw the still-struggling fish overboard, and after snapping a photo of one, I complied. Seconds later, Gabe and Jack, who had been distracted returning their lines to the sea, turned and began looking around the deck for the fish they’d just caught. When they learned I’d thrown them back under orders, they were incredulous. “Those were skipjack tuna!,” Jack yelled. “Nothing wrong with those fish!,” Jack moaned. Andrew, looking a bit sheepish, went to fetch a fish book. With the help of my photo, the fish’s I.D. was confirmed: skipjack! “Next time, you let ME tell you what’s a good fish!,” Jack said, slapping Andrew on the back. Everyone got a hearty laugh out of Jack and Gabe’s lost fish.

Aha! It’s 10:04 local, and the Internet has just popped back on! Our electronic umbilical cord is reconnected—there are dogs and daughters to check on, e-mails to be read, news to be scanned, bills to be paid, blogs to be sent. And the quiet sea, unimpressed with our species, much less our clever technology, rolls on in the blackness just as it did for Balboa and Magellan and ages before them.

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