My Year So Far: Sailing From St. Croix, UVI to San Juan, Puerto Rico

I must preface this by saying our voyage blog is a much more thorough summary of our trip.

I left Woods Hole a week before Thanksgiving and spent a week in St. Croix with my parents where I finished up my college apps and had a bit of time to explore the island, SCUBA, snorkel, befriend a cool Rasta-man, and get an uncomfortable sun burn.

The day after Thanksgiving I joined my classmates from Woods Hole aboard the SSV Corwith Cramer in Gallows Bay, St. Croix.

The Cramer was built by ASTACE in Bilbao, Spain in 1987, for SEA. She is a 134' steel brigantine (or hermaphrodite brig), meaning she is fore-and-aft with two masts, one of which is square-rigged. If it looks like there are tons of confusing ropes on board, that's because there are! Mama Cramer has 9 sails (plus a storm trisail) and accordingly, many many lines to set, trim, and strike each sail. Yes, we did have to memorize all of them. We had a competition where you were given a note-card with a line on it and you had to power walk to touch the right one. I forgot the topsail inhaul!!! I thought I knew the squares'ls the best. I was so ashamed. 

Note how these all look identical (course and tops'l inhauls and outhauls)

We lived in small little "berths". I don't have a picture of mine, but imagine a large coffin with curtains, in the salon (living room/dining room) of the ship. It was nice because I could poke my head out and decide if I liked breakfast or wanted to sleep more. But if I slept with my hand out, people would slap it, pull it, shake it, etc... I liked my berth though.

Anyways. We left two days after Thanksgiving and were sailing along, but then had to return to port when a deckhand was injured. So then we left again! And this time we continued to sail happily along without further stall. 

It wasn't long before we started getting sick. I never fed the fishes, so to speak, but did spend about 85% of my time feeling very nauseated. Of course, being the medical mystery I have always been (mysterious spots in my lungs, allergies to blue potatoes etc...) I have some sort of "special" sea-sickness. We think it may be cured by migraine medicine but I probably won't be back on a boat in a while to test that out. 

As I don't really remember that first week (I was pretty foggy most of the time), I will share my ship's blog post from that leg with you:

28 November 2011
2000 Atlantic Standard Time (7 PM EST)
Photo Caption: Sarah and Gus sweatin’ it out on the jib sheet

On this cool and clear evening (temperature 27.2°C), we are sailing on a course ordered track of 005° with the help of a NE×E wind (Beaufort Force 3) at 2 knots because of our deployed Neuston net tow. Our position is around 16°34’N×065°34’W.

Hello world! Greetings from the middle of the eastern Caribbean Sea! We are your first student bloggers, Dylan and Larissa, writing to you from the ship’s sauna (better known as the library) to tell you about our crazy adventures on the Corwith Cramer!

After a somewhat uneventful evening, the first watch of the day spotted what appeared to be an abandoned skiff on the horizon. Upon further inspection, it was, in fact, an abandoned skiff that may have been cast adrift by a storm. We motored towards it, copied down its information to send to the Coast Guard, and continued on our journey south.  Later, we had our first class, a vastly different experience from those in Woods Hole, in part (largely) because of our still uneasy stomachs. However, we seem to be slowly but surely getting our sea legs. The Fisherman sail was set today, which increased our speed and heel, easing the pitching of the ship, making the afternoon snack of Goldfish and Nilla Wafers much more enjoyable! During snack, we had a visitor. Fat Albert, the plumper of two hitchhiker pigeons, crawled out from his home under the rescue boat to hesitantly peck at some cracker crumbs provided by Ian.

From 1300-1900, the two of us were on lab watch, meaning we assisted the third assistant scientist, Julia, with scientific deployments, data processing, and hourly lab reports. Despite initially knowing very little about oceanographic research, we are becoming competent enough to carry out the aforementioned tasks quite efficiently and accurately. Today, we spent a lot of time processing the samples from the previous watch’s Neuston net tow, which included Sargassum, fish larvae, several crabs, and TONS OF ANEMONE, which sting. Ow. We learned how to measure pH using the spectrophotometer and how to assess the makeup of a zooplankton sample by doing a 100-count. In the biggest scientific news of the day, last night, the Sargassum crab in the aquarium mercilessly devoured all three live fish in the aquarium. It was a tough loss.

Thanks for reading,

Dylan and Larissa

A picture of the aforementioned lab. 

I think this is actually from the tow we mentioned!

Albert. How did he even find us???

The library. So hot because the engine room is through the wall at left

We learned how to navigate by the stars using sextants on that leg. Much of the time we actually did, and only used the RADAR for making sure we didn't hit any boats!

My Year So Far: Woods Hole

After leaving the ice, I spent a bit of time at home working at nature camp, writing college applications, training in mixed martial arts, and being a french tutor. In October I left for Woods Hole, MA, home of WHOI, MBL, and my program of choice, SEA. SEA has a nice campus in Falmouth with four or five cottages and a building of classrooms, labs, and a library. I lived in Bellatrix house with six other kids and shared the responsibility of cooking and cleaning for ourselves, which was fun. In Woods Hole we learned about nautical and marine sciences, marine history and the social and environmental history of the Caribbean. We wrote two papers there, one was on a document and the other a particular theme of change in the Caribbean. I wrote about the history of the Prime Meridian and the Nautical Almanac, and the status of building codes and standards in the Caribbean, respectively.

Woods Hole was a really neat place to live and I hope to spend more time there some day. It was a cozy town right on the water with good food and great scientific resources. Our first weekend there, Woods Hole hosted a TEDx event. If you ever have the opportunity to go to one of those, do! It was a mind-bending, opening, and changing experience and I felt so inspired and informed when I left. Notable were Dr. Hanlon talking about the science of camoflage, Dr. Holmes speaking about Pleistocene Park in Siberia (where I hope to attend a research program in two summers), this talk about Dr. Spock and talking about science and New York Polyphony who sang some of Darwin's words to the tune of a mass. Well that's half of them, but they were all amazing!

I enjoyed spending fall there and biking and running and swimming in the ocean (almost every day until November 6th). There were tons of neat natural spots and a lovely public sheep/goat farm. I didn't really have a camera so I practiced painting a lot of my experiences from memory. One of my favorites is from the day our science teacher led us through the woods to this neat pond with a rope swing. It was November I think, so practically a polar plunge! And our group sustained several injuries, but it was quite enjoyable nonetheless.

My Year So Far: Alaska

The first thing I did as part of my gap year and what also compelled me to continue gapping instead of going to school was living on a glacier in Alaska. Ever since I saw a glacier for the first time two years ago on my NOLS course in the Yukon, I had wanted to somehow explore and learn more about them. My cousin told me about the Juneau Icefield Research Program, and I found that with the help of Steve Kluge, a geology teacher from New York, they had started a cool Pre-College program, which I signed up for.

A few weeks later, I flew into Juneau, and after a night at the U of Alaska South-East, we hiked the challenging 8 miles through the trees, tundra, and ice up to Camp 17 on the Juneau Icefield, indicated on this map by the green arrow. On the left is the Ptarmigan Glacier and on the right is Lemon Creek Glacier.

View Larger Map

The lake you can see in the lower right-hand corner is called Lake Linda, I think. On July 18, the lake suddenly drained. We're talkin, a pretty darn big, maybe football-field sized lake. Three of the scientists living in Camp 17 were there researching this lake for the second or third summer in a row, to figure out where the water goes when it drains.

Kathleen and I lived here, in a cozy little shack called a "Jame's way". We were the only two girls so we had this building, which sleeps 8, to ourselves. To my surprise we had a light and even electricity!

Camp 17, like the dozen or so other camps on the icefield is made up of several buildings. There are four living cabins, two outhouses (one is a double-seater!), a generator shack/workshop, a library, and the main cookshack. Below is a picture of when we were practicing knots inside of the cookshack on a foggy day. There are skis every where, and some of the furniture is made of old skis, all belonging to Maynard Miller who founded JIRP in 1946.

We spent our days cooking and cleaning, learning how to travel and work safely on ice, and doing experiments and collecting data on the ice. Cooking in the shack was very fun. With limited fresh products, it was a lot like cooking on NOLS, but with larger quantities so there was more experimentation. We had a lot of pancakes, spam, pasta, and sandwiches, but also had a few special nights with cake, hot-dogs, and once I made a quiche!

Me, Kathleen, and Cameron taking a break from collecting measurements in the mass-balance pit we dug

We had mostly beautiful weather. No two days looked the same up there, though. Sometimes we would wake up to this:

And sometimes to this:

I brought my film camera along and am very pleased with how it captured some of the more ethereal sights. 

 

Fog rolling over Ptarmigan Ridge

It was a very cool, inspiring adventure, and I hope to return to the ice for two months the summer after this for the full JIRP program. 

Óvegur: Un-road

Hello all! I finally got around to making a place to write and share about my gap year. I couldn't decide what to name it, until I was reading this blog and came across this lovely word, Ovegur.

Humans often use the words in their languages to describe things. The word “vegur” is one of those words. (It means “road”.)

But sometimes they use words to describe things that are not really things.

“Ó-vegur” is one of those words. It means “un-road.”

I think my gap year and life in general haven't followed one path in particular, or a path at all, so it seemed an apt word. (I also love the Icelandic language...)