Florida State University : Research in Review

Day 8 - Saturday, 09/20/08

Position 8:37 p.m. local: N39 59.335 W125 51.831

By the time I was up and drinking my first cup of coffee this a.m., Jack and Gabe had put seven albacore on board with their hand lines. One was another 30-pounder! I was dumbfounded. I asked them kindly not to let me sleep through such action for the duration of the cruise, should it happen again, even if they risked waking my roommate!

Having the Internet today has been a blessing and a curse. While it was reassuring to reconnect with the world, it wasn’t exactly a thrill to be once again awash with all the bad news in it. Our all-too-brief respite from reality is a week old today, and for some of us, it’s getting easier by the day to ignore the human predicament.

Allison learned from her husband that water entered their house in Galveston, despite its being hoisted on 13’ pilings. Good news is that damage is moderate. Russell could get in touch with none of his friends to get a reading on his place. Both Allison and Russell live near the labs run by Texas A&M, all based on islands now inaccessible by car—the main causeways having sustained much damage and being impassible to all but emergency vehicles. Power is still out, and Russell assumes that all the frozen specimens in their labs—now being thawed for a week—are lost, despite the best efforts of A&M crews armed with generators. He and Allison both confirmed that the university has made the decision to move all of its Galveston operations to central campus at College Station until conditions improve. Russell is worried about where he’ll be living when he returns.

Today has been time out of time. A Saturday, it’s appropriately been a day off for the science crew as the Sur churned toward 39 degrees north, our next latitude, a spot only 68 miles or so S-SW of Mendocino, California. We cruised right over one of this region’s most noted (at least to oceanographers) features, the Mendocino Ridge. This is the crest of a 3,000-mile-long fault line that runs almost due west from Mendocino, California all the way into the central Pacific. In places, it juts from the seafloor to within 1,100 meters of the surface. Seismologists call this enormous geologic phenomenon a fracture zone. It is places like this where the titanic forces of plate tectonics demonstrate in full relief how effectively they can rip and tear the earth’s crust when they’ve a mind to.

Also on transit today, we noticed a sharp drop in surface water temperature. Over the course of just a few miles, the temp dropped from about 17 degrees C (62F) to 13 degrees C (55F). Buz suggested the sharp change probably signals our entry into the California current that sweeps the west coast in clockwise fashion, bringing colder water from the north. Could account for the fact that we also caught no tuna this afternoon, the species being notoriously picky about the temperature of its bath water.

By noon today, our piece of the Pacific had become a frameless mirror. Our chieftains in the wheelhouse scarcely could believe what they were seeing—a slick-on-slick sea with a sunny, high-pressure dome seemingly following the Point Sur as if she were a beacon. Despite a forecast of another front approaching from the NW—due to arrive sometime tomorrow night—the prevailing attitude aboard was carpe diem. The e-mail albatross kept many of us deskbound, while others lounged, watched movies, sunbathed on the deck, read, ate too much—easy to do on any vessel lucky enough to have Chef Karen in the kitchen—and generally behaved like spoiled tourists on a Miami love boat.

Around 4, Chef Karen instructed Jack to roll out the barbie, as our resident Aussie, Buz, might say, and fire up the coals. Karen had a surf-and-turf menu in mind, and relied on Jack’s grilling skills to turn her fresh, bacon-wrapped medallions of albacore (carved from a fish swimming this morning) and thick cuts of tender beef into a savory masterpiece. Jack proceeded to do just that! When the dinner bell rang everyone lined up for plates of tuna and steak cooked to perfection, corn-on-the-cob, baked Idahos, steamed asparagus and a tossed salad. Those who could find room polished off the feast with apple pie topped with ice cream. The dinner begged for a fine cabernet, but its absence soberly reminded us that we are aboard a ship decreed by the powers that be to remain as dry as a 1920 temperance hall. Rules, being what they are, are rules, and we shall have no business aboard the Sur without laws deemed sound by long experience at sea. Still…

Given the sumptuous bounty at dinnertime, thank goodness that work, when it came today, came late. At 8:15 p.m. we finally arrived at our third station and made our first cast at 8:30. We are sitting in 3,668 meters—2.15 miles—of flat water. If all goes well, we’ll be able to make our goal of four good casts here before moving on tomorrow evening for station No. 4, only an hour’s steam west.

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