Show Me the Horizon

“Cruising has two pleasures. One is to go out in wider waters from a sheltered place. The other is to go into a sheltered place from wider waters.” – Howard Bloomfield 26'27" N  48'22" W July 4, 2001 14:40 (ship time) The bright blue is gone from the sky. A grey canopy drapes the horizon and lends a completely different feel to the whitecaps marching in from the SW. We have a 5' SW swell running w/ 10-12 knots of wind from the same direction. The ship is rolling 5-8 deg. every 5 sec. We're booking for Barbados with long faces and heavy hearts.  Yesterday, in sunshine and bright moods, we set up at Dusty 1, for retrieving our first sediment trap . This had been deployed in January, 2000 and was one of two major stops on our cruise. The "mission impossible" box was brought up on deck, a cable with sound transducer was lowered over the stern and a signal was passed to the release device on the bottom of the sea.  Though  a p...

Monday, July 02, 2001 19:28  Ship Time 30' N 45" W We're all hot.   We're all hot, but no one mentions it. It's not because of some endurance ethic, or embarrassment of being the one that wimps out or any macho strain.  We don't mention it for the same reason that sailors don't whistle onboard. Sailors just don't talk about the weather much because of superstition of what it will bring.  Kind of like knocking on wood but there being no wood on this hunk of floating steel, better to not say anything in the first place.  As much as some of these folks are suffering in the blazing sun, hardly a breath of breeze, the sickeningly sweet stench of diesel fumes wafting around us, no one would want the heavy weather that all these folks have experienced. That is, all these folks except one, me.  I've looked at the web sites, with the cool shots of the huge seas swamping the aft of the ship.  I've been readin...

It’s the 19th century. You’re a young man seeking adventure and a test of your manhood. You decide to sign up on a ship to see exotic foreign lands. You take the trip to the coast. You find a big coastal town and you walk through the docks admiring the ships. Finally, you spot one that you like. You walk on deck and a tall man dressed in black coat confronts you. It’s the captain. “What do you want lad?” “I want to sign on board sir,” you say. He looks you up and down, and says “Aye. But first I need to give you a test.” You’re not worried. You were expecting this and, in fact, hoping for it. You want to show the captain what you can do. After all, you were always the strongest out of all your friends. You could climb up any rock or tree since you learned how to walk. And you also knew a bit about navigation from your grandfather. You were eager to show what a great addition to the crew you’d make. “How well can you sing?” the captain asks .  (go ahead, click t...

From:  David Art[SMTP: SCI7@KNORR.WHOI.EDU ] Sent:    Sunday, July 01, 2001 4:17:44 PM To:       bgandck@xxx ;  dtodd@wftxxx ; Curtis, Gene;  rjustman@xxx ; Kerry Ridley;  lindseylane@xxx ;  michael.todd@xxx ;  raqueen@xxx ;  sarastevenson@xxx Subject:           dog days in the horse latitudes Auto forwarded by a Rule R/V Knorr 7/1/01 20:36 29'49"N 40'19"W Routine has established itself.  The novelty of the daily actions is beginning to wane, and a nice pattern of the day has grown.  We awoke this morning to a placid slick sea, with hardly a breath of wind.   We are traveling through the "horse latitudes" which lie between the Mid-Atlantic high pressure system and the equatorial trade winds.   This is a zone in the mid latitudes where the wind dies down and before the trades develop....

Here's another example of my team way back in Austin, coming to our assistance while we were 200 miles west of the Canary Islands.  All this satellite communication is pretty routine now, but this capability was rather new and expensive and limited at the time.  We would store our email correspondence and also our data files from research onto a server in a computer lab on the ship.  Then 3 times a day, when a satellite was overhead, we would upload and download our computer traffic.   While setting up the labs, there was one piece of equipment that was tremendously expensive and useful, that was dependent upon a particular Toshiba computer.  This computer had an unexplained glitch preventing it from booting up and yet again, my heros back in Austin came through with stunning success.  I think it was shortly after this that people on the science group started letting me sit at their lunch table.  Speaking of which, one of my first meals on...

I worked at AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) in Austin, TX at the time.  I was in the Facilities department and we designed and built the cleanrooms we made computer chips in.  We ran a very large chip factory.  Here is a link to a video of it.    I ran the CAD group (Computer Aided Design) and there were a number of very smart guys who did all the drawings for our design and construction efforts.  They were very computer and software savvy and were instrumental  in why our Facilities  group was so effective.  Two of these folks, Gene and Paul, supported me during my sabbatical and became a very useful back door of computer help when the science lab folks had computer problems.  I could email them and they knew how to dig into the software and make suggestions on why a computer or a program was not performing correctly.  The science folks were really appreciative that what they first thought of as a near  useless  new...

Note Captain Silva with a cigarette, close to the middle of the ship, hahah! but he is on a deck several stories above the main deck where sampling takes place. Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2001 16:29:57 +0000 (GMT) From: Master R/V Knorr < master@x > To:  crew@x ,  science@x Subject: FYI  Shipmates,      I have had several requests from members of the science party that concerns possible/potential contamination of their sampling (water/air). #1 It is extremely important that the ctd area remain free of cigarette    smoke and other fumes/contaminants anytime there is science activity    in the vicinity of the forward hangar. As you know smoke and fumes and    such can get carried on the wind even if you are not directly in the    vicinity of the ctd area. This can and will contaminate and compromise    the samples and must be avoided at all costs.   ...

The Crew R/V Knorr 6/27/01 21:55 ship time (GMT) 29'14"N 25'11"W I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, To the gull's way and the whale's way, where the wind's like a whetted knife; And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover, And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over. - John Masefield I'm rocketing along almost due west.   It may be better described as rocking along, as the ship lumbers and rolls from one shoulder to the other as we blast along at 12 knots.   This structure is approximately a city block long, 3 small bedrooms wide and 5 stories high.  I’m constantly lost in the maze of corridors, ladders, stairways and secret passageways .  I'm beginning to feel like Harry Potter. The strangest thing is that though there are 22 crew aboard, one hardly ever sees them.  The mystery people show up to start chipping rust early in the m...