MyOcean

A day in the life aboard ship

"All the food has been very scrumptious" - everyone

Now that we’ve gone through the initial burst of research at Molokai, everything seems to have settled down for a little while. For the most part, everyone has recovered from their seasickness. Quite a few people, me included, felt terrible the first couple of days but luckily the help our classmates gave made it a little more bearable.

All the crew is super nice and knowledgeable when it comes to operating and maneuvering instruments like the CTD (measures the conductivity, temperature, and depth), which makes learning how things work a whole lot easier. The kitchen staff is also pretty great! I don’t think I’ve had a bad meal since I’ve been on board plus there’s a whole lot of candy, chips, drinks, and leftovers snack on. Breakfasts occur between 7:15-8:00am, lunches at 11:30am-12:15pm, and dinners at 5:00-6:00pm. If you want to hang out after a meal or whenever, you can watch a movie in the lounge room or play board games in the library.

The rooms are nice and cozy. Personally, I thought they were going to be much smaller than they are but my opinion could be skewed after living in McMahon (a dorm) for a year. Each room houses 2 people and 2 rooms share a shower. My room is located at the front of the boat, so unluckily for seasick me, I was rocked around quite a bit. Once you get down there, there isn’t any natural light, so it’s pretty easy to lose track of time. Last night I went in at 8:00pm and came up for breakfast about 12 hours later. That could’ve been the excessive Dramamine usage working on me though.

At this point in the journey, the shifts are pretty relaxed. Some people work between 6:00am-12:00pm, others from 12:00pm-6:00pm, and the final group works from 6:00pm-12:00am. Right now I’m working in the 12:00pm-6:00pm shift but when we reach the beginning of our transect at 5 degrees north, we’ll begin to work 4 hours on, 8 hours off. To conclude, I’m looking forward to reaching the beginning of our transect on Friday! Until then, there won’t be much to do but I’ll figure out something.