Maybe no one else has been wondering why I
haven’t posted a blog post in over a month… but I sure have. Sorry, this is
long overdue. I kept telling myself to write something, but the longer I waited,
the more there was to cover and the harder that seemed to be to put into words! Just a little update,
currently I am in New Zealand traveling with a friend, but tomorrow we will be
headed home (well, to Hawaii) for Thanksgiving!
This blog post will cover our two weeks at
sea after Suva, Fiji in route to Auckland, New Zealand.
Firstly, my dang first post for
S.E.A’s blog that I mentioned before never got posted. I copied
it to my computer and wanted to share it anyway, so here it is:
Date: October 14, 2014
Current Position: 14°
17.8’S x 178° 09.6’W
Course and Speed: Docked in Leava, Futuna
Sail Plan: Docked
Weather: Rainy, often with torrential downpours
Well well well. Today we did in fact meet the
King. Futuna has two kingdoms, one is Alo and the other is Segevai. We, as a
class, got to meet the King of Alo. Honestly, I had no idea what we were
doing and I don’t think anyone else did either. It ended up being one of the
driest yet most interesting meetings we’ve had: the term “language barrier”
doesn’t really hit you until you’ve sat in a room for an hour being spoken to
in two different languages you don’t understand— while having an inkling that
you aren’t necessarily being welcomed to their community. In the end, it turns
out the King just wanted to speak with us first, before we proceeded with our
visit to Futuna. We were officially welcomed to Futuna and also invited by one
of the people at this meeting to another Communion ceremony tonight.
After the meeting, we were taken around
to a variety of stops including a taro farm, archeological sites, and the
ocean-side dumpsite for Futuna! Once we got back to the ship, a large group of
us decided to trek to the post office to try and contact family and friends via
10 minutes of free wifi. The rain was crazy, but this time we were prepared
with our heavy duty rain jackets.
Later today, we were picked up yet again
in some breezy and wet pick-up trucks to be taken to another Communion
ceremony. When we showed up, our feelings as students were basically like the
night before, including: we’re so out place, there aren’t any other women
sitting under the fale, we look ridiculous in these neon rain jackets, just
smile and drink the kava, etc. Tonight, the gathering was much larger, probably
around 150 people. As seems to be the trend with these sorts of ceremonies, it
began with various different leaders of the community speaking at length in
their native tongue and French. Then as usual the, not so yummy, kava root
drink was passed out in coconut shells by various members of the community.
Soon after, the festivities truly began: the live band started and friendly
people asked you to dance. As I sit here writing this blog post, I listen to
all my friends here aboard the Seamans exclaim how much fun they had tonight.
It was truly something I will never forget. It was an amazing chance for us to
be fully immersed into their community. Whether that was dance with any sort of
person (including the King!), sing with everyone, play instruments with the
guys in the back, eat food prepared by the women, or simply talk to the Futuna
people— it was a night to remember. Personally, one of the greatest parts was
watching the men dance together. Coming from a dance background, I loved
watching every little movement within the dance. For my dance friends back
home, you would have so much appreciated the isolation and intensity in their
every move… even when many were probably 60+ years old!
As far as life of the ship, I’d like to
just leave you with this little pie chart of a poll I took of 5 of the “biggest
struggles” we face aboard the Seamans. My favorite is cleaning the galley mats.
Just imagine extremely heavy rubber mats that without a doubt always leave you
a mess. The winner, however, seems to be the evil bunk fan placement. You just
never are quite able to reach every little section of your tropical sweating
body.
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| Our funny struggles aboard the Seamans. |
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| The Communion Ceremony. Music to the left, dancing to the right, us in the middle wearing our beautiful leis. |
P.S. I would love to send a big aloha to you
Mom! Also, love and hella miss you Rox, Mark, every inch of my
family/friends, da Delta kids, my sweeties, and Haluan! Love you to infinity
Dad, a hui hou.
Lauren Korth, A-Watch, UC Santa Cruz
So there you have it, finally! Alright back to
the topic at hand, our two weeks at sea! Where to begin…
Pretty quickly as we took off from Fiji, the
seas came back to us in full force. After each port stop we usually had a
meeting with everyone except a few people on deck. For this meeting about
Fiji, a very memorable one in fact (if you remember, ask me for details later),
people started dropping like flies. Being docked in Fiji for almost a week, a
lot of people lost their sea legs and had to leave our meeting to go up on deck
to “give back” a little to Neptune. There is no puking in the comfort of the
heads (bathrooms) on the ship. In case anyone was wondering, I only threw up
once, and I can’t even remember when it was, but it was seasickness that
literally lasted 5 minutes… so strange. Almost everyone on board took seasick
meds throughout the trip, including myself. Some people were sick for basically
the entire trip, some never, and some got better as they got used to being at
sea.
I guess I should tell you a little bit more
about how life onboard works. All of us students (who are considered part of
the ship’s crew) were split into three watch groups, A, B and C Watch. 'A' watch
was the best, of course.
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| A Watch. Left to right: Hugh, Laura (our scientist), Will (chief mate), me, Bryn, Rebeca, LP (our deckhand), Holly, and Kate at the bottom |
Since the ship is traveling and a research
vessel 24/7 we have watch times 24/7. There is morning watch (7am-1pm),
afternoon watch (1pm-7pm), evening watch (7pm-11pm), mid-watch (11pm-3am), and
dawn watch (3am-7am). During these watches, you are either on deck making sure
the ship sails along safely (navigation, line handling, maintenance and
steering mainly) or in lab (doing science! Such as counting zooplankton,
filtering chlorophyll A samples, helping with hydrocasts, etc.)
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| Hugh and I modeling the carousel used in hydrocasts |
Each student helps as an assistant steward in the galley at least
once during the trip, and sometimes you can be assistant engineer! Each of our watch groups
rotated through these watch times every day… so some days were better than
others. Such as, if you got mid-watch you then had “the King’s Sleep"
because you could sleep the rest of the night and not get up until a
little before 1pm. Originally we were so tired, so we'd all just go sleep, but
then we got used to it and realized how much fun stuff you could be doing
during the day. And fun could be a number of things:
~journaling
~crafting (some people made pouches/iPad
covers/wallets from old sail scraps, I made jewelry, and some made Turk’s
heads)
~catching up on your sheet anchor (a journal of
notes for Nautical Science and future reference for those of us hoping to
become deckhands or something one day!)
~writing postcards
~look at cool new things in science (such as
from different net tows during lab)
~try and catch some fish off the stern
~play an instrument
~pretend to dance in your head (well this
probably was just me)
~listen to music (with one earphone in only!)
~work on one of your papers….
~chill out in your bunk
~learn to use the sextant
~go on the head rig, which was one of
my favorites:
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| A watch on the head rig |
~and finally, once each person in your watch
group completed the “aloft safety checklist” we could go aloft! 'A' watch was of
course the first to get all of ours done ;) the watch groups were a little competitive...
Now all this might make it seem
glorious and a breeze…. but it was exhausting. Part of this was because a lot
of our time was spent cleaning the ship. Every time you had dawn watch, you
would eat breakfast after and then have to do “DC” (dawn
cleanup) of the entire ship. It was always nice to find your way back to your
bunk and sleep sleep sleep. Once a week we would also have a thorough clean of
the ship during “field day”. 'A' watch was in charge of galley cleanup, which
consisted of clearing almost everything out to be cleaned on deck and then
cleaning every surface of the galley. Oh man this was tough when we were in the
tropics… but by the end I didn’t mind it too much. Field Day’s saving grace was
that we could play music out loud and our steward handed out candy.
On the 28th of October, I was the assistant
steward. I was scared-- and I let our steward know. Some of you may know this
already, but I don’t cook… like at all. So feeding 35 people was a little
daunting. The good part about being assistant steward is that you get a full
night sleep the night before and after. It was a long day but it ended up going
pretty well! The best part was that our steward used my recipe for my mom’s
breakfast fried rice. It was a little taste of home in the middle of the Pacific!
That day we also went aloft! Turns out… although you have a harness on, you
aren’t clipped into anything until you get to the top. Basically, you just
don’t let go. Not going to lie, it was a little scary at first, but wow was it
awesome! Seeing the ship from that view was truly breathtaking.
The 30th of October will go down as the most
beautiful day I’ve ever seen. I don’t remember much else from the day
except that we worked on memorizing the pin rails (where each of the sail lines
is tied off and their names). Now, okay, this day was a terrible sailing day because
there was no wind… butttt I’m just going to let the pictures speak:
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| 'A' Watch after studying the pins |
As for Halloween, I wrote the class blog that day so I’m just going to leave the link for it: http://www.sea.edu/sea_currents/robert_c_seamans/happy_halloween_from_s255 But please
read it if you haven’t already… it’s a good story!
On the 5th of November, while I was plotting our
position in the Dog House, I heard a person with a new accent on the radio… it
was the New Zealand Coastguard! It was a cool moment to know we’d been sailing
to New Zealand this whole time, and finally it was in reach. We started
seeing islands off the coast as well that night.
On the 6th of November, A watch had dawn watch,
which was pretty awesome because it was the morning we pulled into Auckland!
Besides this, it was probably one of the most memorable watches. The days
leading up to it had been increasingly colder, but this night and morning
took the cake-- getting down to 10 degrees Celsius. I literally had 7 layers of
shirts/jackets on and 4 pairs of pants and leggings. Burr. Anyway that night I
relieved our deckhand from lookout on the bow (something we do at night and
coming in and out of port… pretty tough to stand there with only
your thoughts), and not even 5 minutes later I heard a noise in the water. I
looked out in the moonlit ocean and saw something… soon enough what I
thought it might be came true. DOLPHINS!!! It was glorious. I nearly cried. It
was such a great ending to an amazing journey. There they were, at least 5
dolphins, gliding through the water and riding the waves by our bow. They
looked like ghosts going through the water with us in the moonlight. Something
I will remember forever. However, after that, shit got real (pardon my
language). The wind picked up as we got closer to Auckland and it was still
reallllly cold. Short story, we made it. WE SAILED TO NEW ZEALAND.
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| Members of B watch as we were about to dock in Auckland |
It was definitely surreal arriving in Auckland—
knowing it was almost over was difficult to take. A lot of us wish we could
have kept sailing for at least another week. We just felt like we were getting
into the groove of things. So hopefully one day we’ll be back on the Seamans!
Stay tuned for the next blog about the end of
our semester…. (I promise it will be shorter).
