Evening Reflection

By Jonah, 12-4 watch

Today was the first cloudy day we had down here. Seattle wasn’t fully done with us. Now across the equator, we are now on the winter side of Earth rather than the summer side. Here comes the rain. Some people saw a shark near the back of the boat. It’s crunch time for many projects, notably excluding the geology projects, who completed the time sensitive portion of their work on the first couple days of the cruise. The rest of us are scrambling to get our projects off the ground, see some results before the rapidly approaching wall of January 11th. Today was also the second day of winter quarter. Most of us probably didn’t spend more than five minutes today thinking about classes back home. Lord knows I didn’t. I’m not sure how much this has been talked about on the blog, but the sunsets are one of the best parts of this cruise in my opinion. While there wasn’t much of a sunset tonight (due to the clouds), the night air is still warm and humid, and there’s enough wind from transit to keep me at a very comfortable temperature. Sitting on the back deck of the ship, looking out at the expanse of sea and sky, isn’t something that can be done justice by words or pictures alone. As I write this, the last bits of light are fading into the night, and a few stars are starting to shine through cracks in the clouds. It’s a simple scene, but the lack of light pollution allows for near perfect stargazing.
It’s a good evening.