Well I'm back and I can say California is mightly nice this time of year. The cruise was a success...not a ridiculous success but we will be able to satisfy our promises to NSF. I took two grads and an undergrad to San Diego with me. First checking in. You'll be pleased to know as of 30 days ago our ports are safer, you can not walk on a port unless you have a twix card and that will be $100+ thank you homeland security. Second, the guy at the front desk was pleased to tell us we'd be sailing on the bucket....the bucket?...yes the barf bucket. This is the point where you smile nicely and hope the students behind you were not listening too closely.
The Robert Gordon Spoul is one of the smaller boats in the Scripps fleet (the Melville in my Tahiti pictures is one of the biggest). And to be honest, there were no comfortable spots on the boat. The galley was right at the front and the cook suggested we could always take our food to the fantail to eat if we felt sick. The indoor lab was small and the fantail frequently flooded. That was okay becuase I soon learned that there was no hope of collecting a kasten core unless the conditions were calm and fortunately the conditions were calm most of the time.
We collected lots and lots of mud from the last 2 thousand years and the wonderful stratigraphy meant we very quickly learnt the age of the end of the core (within 200 years ) based on flooding events (the grey layers.
Our last move was to try and get some sediments from below 2000 years from a different part of the Santa Barbara Basin...a move that put us in the median strip of the shipping lanes, but the sea picked up and we were unsuccessful at getting any sediment (ie we kept dragging the coring device along the bottom as the current swept us off position in the 'moderate' seas).
Knit-Alongs
Tahiti 2005
- In February, 2005 a scientific party departed from Papetee, Tahiti to sail into the roaring forties and fearsome fifties to hunt for 55 million year old sediment. These are my favourite pictures of more than 300 taken documenting this adventure.
Yarn porn
The sandbox
blog rings
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February 01, 2009
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Twix? Isn't that a cereal or a snack food or something? I'm so out of it.
Posted by: Riin | February 01, 2009 at 05:10 PM
Ah, the Sproul - some good memories from that little ship. Hopefully the crew were as nice as I remember. I noticed at least one wet pant cuff in the photo - the fantail on the Sproul is the worst! Well, its great for launching gliders and stuff, but don't forget your work boots. Glad you had a successful cruise. I head off to Chile at the end of the month...
Posted by: Amanda | February 01, 2009 at 01:24 PM