Motoring, Sailing, and Saltwater Showers

MFT: Showering

LFP: Sleeplessness

Hallo, sorry I haven’t posted in a while, internet is beyond sketchy to come by! Anyways, we had a half-day of sailing into Fakarava yesterday. We had an early morning watch (dawn watch). We got to wake up nice and early before the sun rose and then stay on watch until a bit past sunrise. I was pretty tired by this point between the galley cleanup the night before and various other things I didn’t get to sleep till 9 pm then an early morning wake up of 2:30…URGH. Plus we got to do dawn cleanup in the morning. Good news, it was a pretty sunrise ;). I also got to write my blog for the past two days and make up a quick power-point.

I am supposed to present my research to the students/boat at some point on this trip. I’ve compiled a mix of different things about my background, my past research, my current research, and in particular the fieldwork I am trying to do and why. I’ve also got a bit about how students could help out/side projects they could do. During dawn watch, I was back on science lab assignment. There had been a plankton net tow during the previous watch. So we had to do a hundred count of plankton (very small organisms free-floating in the water) and identify gross genera. I have to say it brought back horrible memories of my 6^th grade science project and the summer I spent identifying lobster larvae. URGH, biology is so much work sometimes ;).

As painful as plankton identification and counting is on land, it's so much worse on a moving vessel. Luckily I got to spend time mostly doing all the other pieces of science watch (hourly observations, fixing the chirp, etc.). I must say SEA focuses rather heavily on the bio side of things. It makes sense but feels a little lonely out here as a geomorphologist with interest in much longer term/larger scale than most of the biologists on board. It also makes me glad I picked Geosciences! I mean bio can be cool…but so much minutiae (and memorization).

After dawn watch and dawn cleanup, I tried sleeping for a bit and again achieved a sort of haze for an hour or so. After which I did Laundry: a nice bucket of saltwater, dirty clothes, and soap. I got to do a quick rinse of my laundry and then a saltwater shower to clean myself up. It was very windy and sunny in the morning so my clothes dried in about two hours. But I kept being worried about them blowing away (lots of people were eager to tell me horror stories of losing all their wardrobe). My knots held, so I ended the morning with clean clothes!

Then we motored into Fakarava atoll around lunch time. We made sure to go at slack tide as there are only two ava for this atoll and the current/waves get pretty strong. Sadly, we hit some rougher seas (5-6 ft waves) so most people were not very happy on deck (I’m still doing pretty well with sea-sickness thankfully). It took us about 1.5 hours to motor in and anchor. As soon as we entered the lagoon the waves dropped off significantly (like 1 ft at most). Sadly it also started to rain quite a bit as soon as we entered the lagoon. But still it was a nice change not to have to hold on to everything.

In the afternoon, we went ashore and got to talk with a regional government official. French Polynesia has a smart system for dealing with far flung islands and disparate people. They send their regional government officials and administrators to most of the islands for a couple of days every year. It was really interesting talking to the administrator of the interior ministry for the Tuamotu islands. She was incredibly nice and helpful. She talked to us for about an hour answering a range of questions from the students. Then we got to wander around the village. I managed to find the post office (rumored to have internet…unfounded sadly) and the grocery store (OREOS!).

For the evening I managed to draw galley cleanup and then 4-6 am anchor watch (urgh). It was a VERY long day but hopefully worth it to get to our first ATOLL in French Polynesia. I hope you enjoy the photos.