A Hui Hou!

Alright everyone, this will be quick! Today I left from home and flew to Honolulu where I've met up with my classmates and soon will be departing to Pago Pago (pronounced Pango Pango), American Samoa! There, we will board the Robert C. Seamans for the next 6 weeks until we get to Auckland, New Zealand and disembark to stay another week at a marine lab outside of Auckland. Again, during our voyage we will be stopping in Samoa, Wallis (Uvea) and Futuna, Fiji and then finally NZ. During this time at sea I do not know when I'll find Internet at port stops, so you may or may not hear from me for a while! 

If you would like to follow our travels, you can check our ship's blog at: http://www.sea.edu/voyages/blog_seamans_238

This may be updated daily or every few days. But please check it out!

A hui hou!

~LTK

That Was Shore-ly The Best

Wow, what just happened. 

A little surreal leaving Woods Hole yesterday morning. It was our home for the past 4 weeks of the first shore component, and it went by so fast. Looking back at the first day, I was remembering how alone I felt when my friends dropped me off on campus. I guess “alone” isn’t the right word I’m looking for, because it was so exciting and I knew it would be great-- but I was still in a completely new place, with a group of strangers I was going to have to get along with whether I liked it or not. Yesterday, I found myself having the same feeling at the Boston airport. However, this time it was because I had to say goodbye to my new friends from SEA…. well just for a week!

In exactly a week we will all be meeting again in Pago Pago, American Samoa. Feels like I’ve been waiting for this for a long time, yet I still can’t believe it’s this close! On the first day of the shore component in Woods Hole, everyone at SEA was telling us the following 4 weeks would fly by. And what'd ya know— it did. Despite the fact that this past week was basically finals week, our time in Woods Hole really did go by quickly and it seems like I’ve been friends with these people for months. Okay side note— everything I just said, I kind of figured I’d be saying by this time. I mean of course I had fears that maybe everything wouldn’t be as great as I’d hoped or the people in my program would be crazy… but in reality I knew it would be great. Nevertheless, I’m still so happy I can sit here and say how amazing this program and these people are. Of course everything hasn’t been perfect, but I don’t have to tell you that…. BECAUSE THE GOOD THINGS ARE FAR TOO GOOD. 

Like safety class!

I will tell you a little about how terrible this last week has been though— sorry, again with my over exaggerated words. It wasn’t "terrible", it was just... you know... finals week, which I personally find pretty synonymous with terrible. I think the saving grace was that at the end, we would be done and heading to the Seamans (details in 1st blogpost). Also, that all of us were in it together. Usually I’m one of the last ones to go to bed, but almost everyone was sleep deprived this week. With around 30 pages of research/literary analysis papers and I don’t even know how many pages of reading (probably would know had I finished them…whoops) we had to get shit done. In ways, we were all a little bummed the bulk of the work load was pushed to the end of the program, but I'm glad we had time to explore the area and socialize with each other the first 3 weeks. Anyway, we made it! 

Woohoo!

We keep getting told that life aboard Seamans will be even more tiring than what we’ve been doing so far. This is understandable since we have quite a bit to do aboard the Seamans. Not only will we be continuing our courses and research, but we will be helping maintain and run the ship. We’ve been briefed on a lot of “life at sea” but it’s hard to conceptualize and understand everything until we get there. Our head resident Jeremy, who is awesome (hear his majestic voice here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tc8ZvENm-5I), explained life at sea pretty well the other night. He said to just think of it as a foreign country, which is true because it will be a completely different language, a different way of working and you won’t know where anything is. It’s going to be a lot of work, but it will of course be an exciting challenge!

The beginning of last week was pretty great though. Last Friday, we went on another field trip—this time to the town of Wellfleet. There we helped the Woodberry’s with their clam farm. After this we had our lunches at Monomoy Natural Reserve. I think pictures would better describe this, so if you haven’t seen them yet, here they are:

We made it to Wellfeet... half asleep

The Woodbury's show us the ropes

First, we had to take out the crabs and worms amongst the baby clams

It was a dirty job...

... well for some

Crab!

Preparing the bed

After spreading out the clams, we covered them with net

Great team effort :)

After, we talked to the harbor's Constable

Monomy National Wildlife Refuge

Absolutely beautiful.

Despite that fact that we had to get up at a god-awful hour to get there while the tide was out, it was a lot of fun. The whole time laying the clams, I couldn’t help but think about the times crawdad fishing with my Dad. Although we only got to do this maybe a couple times a year, it was on of my favorite things. By the end of the day, like most new experiences, all I wanted to do was tell my Dad all about the clams. I think he would have been fascinated by the way they “farm” them, and the fact that I ate quite a few and actually enjoyed them! Besides all the hard work and fatigue I’ll probably be experiencing at sea, I know the hardest part will be moments like this. I know he’ll be watching though. Like I said in my first blogpost, he really wanted to go on this trip too, so I know he’ll be there <3

Here's some of my favorite photos from crawdad-ing:

Crawdading in the Delta, I think in 2007?

Most recent time out in the Delta

Red hawwwwt in the rice fields

Dancing in the Library

I've told myself every night this week that I'd go to bed earlier. However, now it's 1:30am and I'm just sitting down to write this. I know I'll regret it in the morning when my roommates get up early to go on a run or when the majority of my house is making themselves a nice breakfast.

To recap on the past 10 days...

Last week we had a meeting with our captain about what to pack for sea, and he gave us more information about what life will be like on the ship. It was extremely helpful, but also just made me even more excited to finally start the voyage!

Last Friday, we went on a class field trip to the New Bedford Whaling Museum. I didn't really know what to expect but when I walked in and saw this, I knew it would be a cool day:

We went to the museum because although New Bedford, Massachusetts was the "hub" of the whaling industry in the U.S., a large part of it took place on the other side of the states-- the Pacific Ocean. Whaling obviously had a huge impact on the whale populations, but also the people in Pacific Islands and surrounding continents. Although I was probably supposed to take more "relevant to our studies" points away from the tour of the museum, I found these two things the most exciting: 1. Turns out people from the Azores (Portugal) had a large role in these whaling voyages. 2. A half size whaling ship replica that we could explore:

Apparently, in the Atlantic, the Azores were one of the main stops for whaling ships-- and often many Azoreans got on board to be apart of the crew. The reason I found this fascinating was that part of my Dad's side of the family, quite a few generations back, was from the Azores. Although I don't know much about the Azores, nor Portugal for that matter, it is a part of me-- and I've grown up in a small community that strangely has a lot of Azoreans. It was interesting to learn that New Bedford is kind of like the Delta in that way, in that there still are a lot of people from the Azores there too. After learning all this, I couldn't help but think maybe seafaring is actually in my blood, and maybe I might be good at this tall ship sailing... Well we'll see.

After the museum, we walked down to one of the fishing docks to talk to some scallop fisherman. What in the world does this have to do with our program? Not really anything at all, except that it gave us practice at talking to local people and asking the right questions. This will be a lot of what we are doing at port stops during our voyage to collect information for our research papers.

Speaking of research papers....

During our short 4 weeks here in Woods Hole, although we are tempted by the beach everyday, we have lots of work to get done before we leave. The bulk of the work is three substantially long papers for three different classes. Two of the papers we will be finishing up at the very end of our program in New Zealand, after we collect information from the islands we visit. These are for our Maritime History & Culture Class and Marine Environmental History. My two topics are (broadly) Surf Tourism and for the other, Waste Management. So, stayed tuned for lots of pictures of surf and trash!

Despite the fact that I really enjoy my paper topics, this is going to be a rough next week-- we all keep realizing how much other stuff we have to get done and well... I guess we'll get it done.

Tonight I have been in the library trying to start outlining things.  I thought I was going to walk back to our cabin a while ago, but then I got the urge to move around. I needed to dance, and I know it sounds weird to people who don't dance but it helps with life :)  I've been wanting to dance for the past week, but it's kind of hard to do that with 40 other students around the campus. Dance isn't really something like soccer where you could practice it outside and no one would care-- because if you just started dancing, people would be weird about it. Alas, I find myself in our small little library, late at night, blasting good music,  finally moving, and feeling refreshed-- apparently enough to write all this. So there you have it, that's what I've been up to and I probably won't write again until this portion of the program has come to an end!

Interesting things of the week:

~Feeling proud of my home institution's Environmental Studies department for giving an awesome view on this field, and letting me feel like I actually know some things here!

~ Also kudos to UCSC for making the one hill we have at SEA seem like a breezeeee after all those torturous stairs and paths on UCSC's campus.
~I've really come to appreciate that we have to plan our dinners together here and eat together almost every night. Turns out it's actually pretty great to be forced to be together. Our house even decided to do "highs and lows of the day" at each dinner.

~No matter how cool our teachers are, they are still college teachers and know how to confuse and overwhelm us.
~Some of us watched the short documentary, Disruption. After, we had an awesome climate change conversation amongst each other and some of our faculty, just for fun. I loved it.
~Today we found out that the famous Hokule'a should be in Pago Pago near our ship, the Robert C. Seamans while we are there!! If you don't know what it is, check it out and follow its world voyage! (http://www.hokulea.com/) Truly wishing I could have called my Dad and told him about it, but yet again I think he had a hand in making it happen anyway... <3

Hokule'a -- Polynesian voyaging canoe

~LTK

Summer Has Officially Ended

Phew. Made it through the first week and weekend here at SEA. As expected, it's been a little weird getting back into the groove of school, but it's going! Here, we stay in our classroom all day (except for breaks and lunch) and our teachers alternate courses. I love having the small class size that we do, In addition, I love knowing these are the people I will be learning with on a tall ship soon enough too! Each day we have about three out of our 5 classes, and everyday we have a hefty amount of reading. This weekend, although Labor Day weekend, was basically a weekend of reading. But we all managed it for the most part and are ready for the 2nd week of our shore component to begin!

Last week, our Captain (Nautical Science teacher as well) went over our actual itinerary for the trip, and although the dates may always change since we'll be sailing, the destinations will stay the same! We will be starting in Pango Pango (Pago Pago), American Samoa --> Apia, Samoa --> Mata'utu, Uvéa (Wallis) --> Leava, Futuna --> Suva, Fiji --> Auckland, New Zealand (second shore component).

We will be typically staying 3 days at each port stop, and our longest stretch out at sea will be from Fiji to New Zealand (about 14 days). This won't just be a cruise, because we'll be sailing for most of it, helping navigate, taking care of the ship, keeping watch and getting minimal hours of sleep. In addition, we will be continuing research on projects that we begin here in Woods Hole and learning more about the places we visit, the oceans we sail, and how to sail. I'm one of the few people that has sailing experienee in my class (and still very minimal), which I was kind of surprised to find out. Some of my new friends (classmates) know they get sea sick and/or haven't been on boats much, but EVERYONE is ready to go on this adventure-- and that's what makes me excited. We are all here for different reasons, mine can be found in my first blog post, others are starting their first years of college later, some needed more credits, some just like sailing, but we all are damn excited to do this. As we trudge through our homework, I think it just sits in the back of our minds that this month we'll be setting out to sea!

Despite all the homework, we've been trying to explore the area and become closer as not only classmates, but also friends. On Friday, some of us road bikes into the quaint little town of Woods Hole.

Later that night, our "RA" like dude here had an ice cream social for us and the other class, which may seem a little silly to even bring up... but look at all this ice creammmm!

Saturday, we had a Bike Fest (AKA biking safety event), where I just barely lost the "slowest person to the finish line" race. Later, we again went to the beach. Except by this point things had gotten a little more serious and we all brought homework with us...

Sunday, some of us biked into the still small, but larger town of Falmouth for lunch. We experienced the herds of Labor Day weekend Cape Cod tourists... but it was fun!

We couldn't really find a place for all our bikes, so we decided to stick together...

By the time we headed home a storm started rolling in and it ended up pouring with lightning and thunder in the evening! The weather since then has been soooo humid. Sometimes, I swear I must be in Hilo or something!

Today, I literally spent hours upon hours reading but walked to the beach for sunset and had a lovely evening with my housemates. All in all, it was a long but good Labor Day Weekend! Sunday was also my Mom's birthday, and I'd just like to now insert an obligatory mom/daughter picture from us last year on her birthday.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM!

Now I think I'll just leave a section with all the interesting little things I've experienced thus far:

~Mostly everyone else here can get to bed before me, because my friends and family are three hours behind and talking to them happens later, and thus pushes me writing this blog post back into the hours of the AM....
~The UC's are actually pretty affordable when you compare them to the small private universities a lot of my clasmates attend
~But Canada still wins for cheapest (we have our token Canadian, she's awesome, and sidenote they have some awesome coinage, ay)
~No one is obsessed with Disneyland out here. What a sad world.
~Talking to the one girl that goes to UC Davis from the other SEA class about In n Out made my night

Anyway, this is where I think I should stop rambling and get to bed. If you read all of this, thanks for taking the time-- in a few weeks I will be cut off from the world and you won't hear from me at all, so enjoy it while you can ;)

~LTK