Day 29: How this all works

To answer a question from the audience, this is how my job works.

The National Marine Fisheries Service (the people who use my data) only allows their scientists to be deployed for 90 days before they have to come back to Anchorage, AK or Seattle, WA and get their data 'debriefed'. Apparently this entails them asking you about every number you have written down over the past 90 days so they know how accurate each piece of data is.

The joke among observers is that we have a 90 day work week with a weekend that lasts until our money runs out. At that point you call up your company and tell them you would like to work again.

My 90 days started June 7th so I am expected to be shipped back to Seattle at the beginning of September. After that I am spending the fall in Friday Harbor, WA doing biological research at Friday Harbor Laboratories.

Day 30

Internet in Dutch has been down for a week so I was unable to post more pictures.

So I have been in my bed holding on as we have been in some pretty bad weather. It is not scary it is just horrible being seasick for 3 days straight. I have not eaten or slept in 3 days but what has made it better has been that the factory has not been running so I dont have to get out of bed. Everytime I stand up all I want to do is lie back down. But the wind has let up so I am back to normal.

Days at Sea: 24 Indignation

Some of my readers have known me since the day I was born (shout out to the grandparents), some have lived with me all four years of college but none of them probably know the background to this post.

Preschool was traumatizing. Okay so now that you know this I will get to how it relates to life on the Bering Sea.

I wear 4 layers of clothes in the factory and 3 in the rest of the boat. Every time I come out of the factory (about 5 times a day) I wash my hands. Even though I was wearing 2 layers of gloves my hands still manage to get really gross. I never manage to get all 3 of my long sleeved layers pushed up far enough so as the day goes on the ends of my sleeves get wet. I HATE having wet sleeves and go to great lengths to avoid it in "real" life. So I was walking through the boat with wet sleeves getting more and more indigent and then finally I thought to myself "ERRR this is just like preschool" "Woah where did that come from". I only have a couple of memories of preschool but I do distinctly remember thinking that when I got old enough to reach the sink by myself I would never get my sleeves wet, and I have managed to stick to my promise for a solid 20 years.

Then this got me thinking about the other traumatizing experiences of 1992. Going to the Puget Sound sitting down in front of a rock, lifting it up and having tons of baby crabs crawl up my shorts. I did not wear anything but spandex shorts until the 4th grade when they were mandatory for our soccer uniforms. Also that year my older sister told me that she did not like sausage and in my 4 year old mind that became "all things from pigs are inedible". I stuck with that one until I was 20 years old sitting in a cafe in Vienna, Austria starving and I what I ordered included a big slam of ham, and hunger beat out 16 years of obstinacy. P.S. I learned that year that bacon is one of the best things humans have ever created and have never looked back.

Days at Sea: 23 A Day In the Life

So instead of figuring out what day it is, which is harder than it sounds I now mark time based on how many days I have been at sea. Mainly this is because if I take that number and subtract it from 90 I get how many days I have left, a much more important number. I am having a good time but working 12 hours a day then shutting myself in a dark room for 10-12 hours while trying to sleep with my bed moving all over the place lends itself to the thought "didn't I just do this". Here is a day in the life of a fish observer who got stuck with the sucky shift.

11:45PM Alarm goes off
11:50PM Convince yourself to put on several layers of clothes
MIDNIGHT: Report to the factory and start taking data
1:30AM Watch the sun go down
3AM Eat Breakfast
8AM Leave factory (which I have been in since midnight)
8:30AM Start entering data into computer
10AM Run back down to the factory to get more data
11AM Run back up to the wheelhouse to enter data
NOON: Skip lunch and go to room
12:15PM Shower (possibly depending on many factors)
12:30PM Go to sleep

And repeat this day after day so that you think that you dont remember any part of the day not spent in the factory watching fish go past or cutting them open to find out what sex they are.

June 28th:Shower via fire hose

On almost all fishing boats there are an infinite number of uses for their high pressure fire hoses, the least of which is fighting fires. They use them to hold fish onto incline belts when they are slipping down, they use them to move large amounts of fish by blasting one edge in a bin and to clean anything in sight. Today we had a couple of huge halibut and the only way that I can hold on to them (they are super slimy) is to body hug them and put them in my basket. At the end of the sample I was covered in slime guts and scales and every time I tried to wipe it off it just smeared to a new place on my rain gear. So Hung (the back line guy who helps me sort) took his fire hose and just hosed me down like dad used to threaten when I was little. I have put my rain gear in the laundry a couple of times and it never comes back completely clean but Hung's fire hose wash was the cleanest it has been in a couple of weeks.

Wildlife Viewing

A couple of cool things I have seen this week... a sea lion came up to the boat, luckily it came to the bow so I got to see it from the wheelhouse. And if it would have gone to the stern of the boat looking for fish I would have had to fill out a bunch of paperwork stating that the fishing industry interacted with a marine mammal. Later that day the deck boss came to find me in the factory to tell me there was a shark on deck (they are required by law to tell me if anything is too big to go into the factory). So I am thinking this is huge shark and I get all excited. It turned out to be a baby sleeper shark that was only about a yard long and sleeper sharks don't really have teeth. Still cool but not as awesome as I was hoping.

Dutch Harbor Earthquake

Just in case some of you were worried...I know there are a couple of you. We left Dutch Harbor the day before the earthquake hit. I am currently safely straddling the international date line far from Dutch Harbor. In case there is another one, don't worry I am an old pro at earthquakes, this would have been my 3rd earthquake. It is driving in snow that scares me to no end not Bering Sea storms and earthquakes.