Days at Sea 1: Back at it

I have signed another contract and am headed back to Alaska for the winter season. I dont know how much there will be to post besides...I am cold, today was colder than yesterday, I did not think it could get any colder,etc. I will do my best to find an amusing story or two.

Days at Sea 88: Home Sweet Home

I finally got the email telling me that it is my turn to go home. It came just in time because the scientists who got sent home a couple days after me had to sit in Dutch Harbor for 3-5 days waiting for the fog to lift and planes to fly.

My trip home took a very long time but I did make it. Here is what my itinerary ended up looking like.

4am: go to the ferry dock for the 5am ferry from Akutan to Dutch Harbor
7am: Ferry arrives, the anchor had fallen off at the last stop so it was several hours late
11am: Arrive in Dutch Harbor and get a ticket for the next availible flight
7pm: Fly from Dutch Harbor to Anchorage, AK
midnight: Fly Anchorage to Seattle. I was pretty tired at this point, I dont even remember the safety briefing happening
5am: Land in Seattle and my dad picks me up.
6:30am: 26 hours of travel, 88 days at sea and I am finally HOME!

Days at Sea 82: Choose your friends wisely

It keeps growing and growing

and growing I am up to 7 right now.

I LOVE good fresh local produce, I mean go out of my way, dream about it all winter love the fruits of Eastern Washington and Oregon. So I was sad to have to give it up this summer but oddly I am actually getting a bunch of nectarines up
here.

They ship them up here but there is not enough to give to
everybody but...I have a boyfriend in the galley, in addition to my
forklift boyfriend, bar boyfriend, and sorting belt boyfriend, I hope
they all don't meet each other some day:) (note they all are probably old enough to be my father and from either Mexico or the Philippines and have very limited English so these relationships consist of me smiling and nodding) My galley boyfriend is in charge of all the produce and he started wooing me with 2 nectarines everyday, when I come up to the line for breakfast they call him from the back and he brings them out to me.

They feel like apples so I say 'thank you these are great' then take
them back to my room and wait a week or so, I am acquiring quite a
collection. Yesterday he only brought me 1 and he apologized he had
set 3 aside for me but I was an hour late for breakfast, normally I am
there when the doors open, he couldn't protect them for that long so I
only got 1. This morning he did save me 3 but I told him that was too
many and he let me get away with only taking 2.

Even with these mass produced ones (that are better than I thought
they would be) I still cant wait for a good Yakima nectarine where
the juice is running down my face

Day 73: A Short Hike up a Steep Hill

View of the Plant from the top of the hill



All of the Aleutian Islands are essentially nearly vertical mounds of volcanic rock that go straight into the sea and spread out across the North Pacific. The highest point on a lot of them are between 1,000 and 2,000 feet, so a hill to anyone on the West coast and a mountain to anyone on the East Coast. After looking at the sea for 2 months they look huge so I will refer to them as mountains for the rest of this post.


A lot of observers like to hike, I hate walking up hills for just about any reason, so I have never gone along. Until yesterday. The mountains take off from right behind my bunkhouse and they look very daunting, but yesterday my friend from training, Laurie, and another observer waiting for his boat to show up, Jack, decided to go and since I enjoy spending time with both of them, I decided to go. Also I thought since I had such good company the mountains did not look quite so daunting that day. We started the hike and we were almost to the top when we broke through the low fog. It was at that point that I realized that the fog had been hiding the top half of the mountain, it was an optical illusion not good company that made the hike seem more doable. Since they had slept all morning while I had been working, I got them to take a picture with me, called it the top and then climbed down the moutain by myself to go to bed. On the way down I slipped on some mud and landed on my bum in the grass, nobody was around to see so I just got up and kept going.

When I got back to my room I reached in my pocket to find my keys and they were not there, I assumed they fell out when I fell but I really needed to go to sleep. The next day when I was working one of the other vessel observers who is really into hiking was going up the hill (there is only one path). As a joke I told her to look out for my keys and when she came back 2 hours later she had a big smile and said "look what I found" and pulled my keys out of her pocket! Case and point...everything always works out it Jessicaworld.

Oh and I cant find the cord to my camera so I cant post the pictures of the hike

Days at Sea 67: My job is thankfully not a brain surgeon

My cubical:


This is what I do when I am not watching a conveyor belt of boats offloads. I look inside the fish to figure out if it is a boy or girl and then length it and weigh it.



For a couple of lucky fish I get to dig around their brains for their ear bones called otoliths. Fish otoliths are filled with information very similar to tree rings. They can tell someone with the right equipment if the fish grew a lot in one year and not so much in another because of food supply. This is a sablefish and their otoliths are tiny and very hard to find, I only managed to find 2 of the 5 I was suppose to get. I secretly think they say 5 hoping we would get 2or 3. As I kept missing the right part of the brain and had to dig around with my forceps in the brain I thought it is probably a very good thing I have no desire to be a brain surgeon someday.

Days at Sea 66: too much time on my hands

I have to wear hearing protection and a hairnet in the factory and they are HUGE so I decided to create an experiment. Hypothesis: I can fit my whole head into the hairnet, not just my hair. Conclusion : well you can see for yourself




My mother has requested more pictures of me smiling so here you go...

Days at Sea: 65 The Week of Jellyfish

One boats totes of Jellyfish that are lined up to be loaded back on the boat to be discarded at sea.


It seems like every week we have a new theme in the form of bycatch. Pollock is the cleanest fishery in the world meaning that when you mean to catch Pollock that is normally all you catch. Last week everybody caught a bunch of salmon with their Pollock which is a major no no. It also means a lot of work for me because I have to count all the salmon and take scale samples and genetic samples for the labs back in Seattle. This week all the boats were coming in with jellyfish instead of salmon. It means the boats take a little longer to unload since there is a bunch of sorting that has to happen but at least I don't have to count all the jellyfish. That would be a nightmare.