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| Daily Updates: June
2003 |
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TODAY'S WEATHER
Partly Cloudy
74°F (23.3°C)
Latitude: 35° 27'N
Longitude: 61° 36'W
Wind Direction: SW
Wind Speed: 21 Knots
Sea State: 4
Sea Temperature: 74°F (23.3°C)
Swell(s) Height: 6 Foot
Barometric Pressure: 1018.5 MB
Visibility: Unrestricted
BREAKFAST
Orange French toast
Sausage links, Spam (r)
Scrambled eggs
Hash browns
Bagels
Oatmeal
Fruit
LUNCH
Ida's minestrone
Clark's Island burger
Bratwurst and Bourbon St. beans
Chunky seafood salad
Corn and pepper rice pilaf
Potato chips
Birthday cake
Gingerbread cake with Rogale icing
Fruit
Salad bar
DINNER
Boneless breaded pork chop
Crispy sole filet
Barley and orzo pilaf
French fries
Broccoli
Mixed vegetables
Corn bread
Blond brownies
Salad bar
Rock ‘n’ roll
June 9, 2003
By Joe Appel
We’re already pining a bit for Muir Seamount.
A day’s transit north to the area around Rehoboth and Vogel
Seamounts has been a day’s travel away from relatively calm
seas to…well, let’s put it this way: I just put some
duct tape on the bottom of my tea cup so it won’t slide
across the desk.
Yes, that’s right, we’re back into some unkind seas. Winds up around
20 knots, swells hitting 10 feet. Could be worse, but could be better, too. The
boat is hurling side to side, which is much less fun than front to back. A couple
of us have hit the seasickness medications. We’re rockin’ and rollin.’
Rock ‘n’ roll, in fact, is one of
the best medicines out here. Music is everywhere on the ship,
in a mind-boggling array of devices and environments. In the
main science lab, someone’s hooked up an iPod to a set of
booming speakers, so that sorting corals becomes a dance set
to music by Wilco or Beck.
On night duty, biologist Rhian Waller sits at her laptop, sifting through an
endless stream of photographs of bio samples. Without Macy Gray on her headphones,
would she go mad?
On the other side of the room, Co-chief Scientist Dan Scheirer has his headphones
plugged into Sheryl Wheeler. If you could see his computer screen, jammed with
a multitude of windows of maps, mapping programs, e-mail, and obscure geophysical
data, you’d understand his need for Wheeler’s soothing tunes.
Outside the lab, the sounds continue. Ordinary Seaman Kevin Threadgold is in
the hallway or some corner on deck, painting a railing or grinding a burr or
fixing a light. You know he’s there before you see him, since he’s
always singing a tune you think you’ve heard before but you can’t quite
place.
If you go to the bridge for something, you’re lucky if 3rd Mate Rick Bean
is on watch. Rick’s got great taste in blues. Sometimes it’s B.B. King
or Elmore James and you smile in recognition. Sometimes it’s someone you
don’t recognize, and you smile even wider.
In the Alvin hangar, the crew’s got their speakers hooked up to a
101-CD changer, so it’s a bit of a crapshoot, especially if they’ve
got the “random” button pushed. You’re there grooving along to
Bob Marley or Bob Dylan when all of a sudden they jolt you with some angry metal
tune.
Me, I’m here finishing up for the night with John Coltrane getting me through
it all. In jazz, as in all good music, as on RV Atlantis when the seas
are churning, you never know exactly what to expect.
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