Boat Check with Sydney

Ahoy! And welcome aboard the SSV Robert C. Seamans, which is currently positioned at around 11 degrees N and 158 degrees W on track to our “Aloha 2” waypoint at Swordfish Seamount. I’m currently serving as JWO (Junior Watch Officer) on afternoon watch from 13:00 to 19:00, and I’m responsible for conducting the hourly boat checks we do 24/7 to make sure salad dressing isn’t spilled, the boat isn’t on fire, and that all machinery is in working order.

I start off on the quarterdeck, which is the mustering and community space on deck where we spend most of our time outside. Drive is on helm steering a course ordered of 355 degrees and we’re motor sailing upwind, and North, on a starboard tack.

Barb is camping out by the fishing lines, hoping to catch the famed blue marlin, a mahi mahi, or a yellowfin tuna. Diego’s reading on top of the navigational space on the boat, also called the doghouse or charthouse, and Jan’s laying against the emergency life raft with a cup of coffee in his hand.

We’re sailing at about 8 knots, which is relatively fast for a boat our size. Combined with the rolls and waves of the open ocean, it’s pretty hard to walk, and I stumble around the quarterdeck holding onto the various emergency water jugs, handrails, and poles I can reach. Nothing seems out of the ordinary on the quarterdeck, so I venture down the stairs at the back of the boat to the science deck, the location of the wet and dry lab. The science team has just completed a CTD (Conductivity, Temperature, Depth) hydrocast, and I notice that my fellow B-watchmates are drawing water into glass bottles to measure the pH of a water sample that has been taken from 400m deep in the open ocean! My teammates alert me that all is as normal in the science lab, so I continue walking to the bow of the ship.

Here, Lilah, Jessie, and Regina are getting their workout in, braving waves that crash into the hull of the boat and splash over the railing. I step around their dumbbells and resistance bands to check in with our lookout, Kelly. Kelly stands clipped in at the very front of the Seamans, scanning the horizon for other boats, squalls on the horizon, and fishing buoys. Bow lookout on the Seamans offers an almost-perfect 360 degree view of the open oceanic desert we’re passing through, and is also one of the best places on the boat to sing your heart out. Kelly describes the schools of flying fish she saw to me, and as I make my way back to the quarterdeck, I can hear her rendition of Justin Bieber’s “Baby” behind me.

Everything seems to be normal on deck, so I make my way downstairs, through the charthouse, and into the salon. The salon, or dining space, on the Seamans is simultaneously the place we eat, do project work, take meetings, and socialize on the boat. Maitri, Karthik, Mia, and Chinmay play anagrams in the corner of the salon on top of a gimbled table that tilts up and down depending on the rolls of the boat. Bread sits proofing on the largest table, a sign that we’ll be having a delicious dinner later that night. I check in with Ashley, the boat’s steward, in the galley, and then remove the hatch from the chores closet and climb down into the dry stores room. I’ve been sent to retrieve two cans of potatoes, as we’re starting to run out of fresh produce at the end of our voyage.

As I throw up two large cans of potatoes from the ladder, Jenny’s hands meet mine and she takes the cans back to galley. Everyone on the boat feels a sense of mutual responsibility to keep the ship in order and work as a team to help each other. After closing up the dry stores, I walk into the focsle of the Seamans, aka the zero-gravity part of the ship, and the location of my bunk. After looking around the focsle, nothing seems out of the ordinary, so I walk back through the salon to the aft cabin and sleeping quarters of the ship. I slip into the engineering room to complete my engine room check, the last component of a boat check.

The engine room is one of the only places on the Seamans where you can get any semblance of alone time, and it’s mostly because it’s extremely hot and very loud. Nate and JP, the boat’s engineers sit in the front engine room. After a short conversation about mycelium, I put on a pair of earmuffs to protect my ears and enter the machinery space carrying a grease pencil and a laminated board. I collect data related to the ship’s engine, the fuel tank, the water makers, refrigeration system, and sewage system, and log it all into the logbook. Although the engine’s RPM is a little high, nothing seems out of the ordinary, so I head back to the quarterdeck and report to my head watch officer. This is where my boat check ends, and each boat check takes around 20-30 minutes to do.

Every day aboard the SSV Robert C. Seamans, 24 boat checks are completed by our 40 crew members to ensure the safe passage of our vessel. Day or night, in squalls or sunshine, underway or at anchor, these boat checks are always completed. All around the boat, if you look closely, you’ll see the words “Love and Gratitude” written on machinery and other fun spaces by engineer Nate. That’s exactly what I feel for my watchmates, my bunkmates, and the wonderful crew of this ship as we’ve learned to work together, depend on each other, and care for each other over these last 4 weeks.

In the spirit of love and gratitude, thank you to my wonderful friends and family for checking my emails, picking up my belongings from Hopkins, and supporting my dreams of studying the ocean! Thank you for the sweet cards, I just opened them! Although I’ve loved being without the Internet for the past month, I miss chatting with you all a lot <3  --Sydney

Love and Gratitude

Every hour of every day, someone onboard the RCS completes a boat check, where they ensure each of the ship’s critical systems are running smoothly. While doing the boat check, you spend lots of time amongst the humming and whirring machinery of the engine rooms. On the watermakers, the generators, the marine sewage device, and scribbled all about the engineering spaces, you can see someone has inscribed 3 simple words in black sharpie Love and Gratitude.

For the past four weeks I’ve been wondering about the story behind all of these notes. Why were they written all over the engineering spaces?

We should start by asking who the scribbler is. Obvious to anyone onboard, the scribbles belong to our beloved Nate Bears. Nate, a lifelong marine engineer and practitioner of mindfulness and martial arts, is the lifeblood of this vessel. Quite literally, he is the one that keeps the generators running, the refrigerator cool, and the poop pumping. I could write a whole blog about Nate, his self-made shoes, and his qigong lessons, but I want to focus on his mantra: Love and Gratitude.

Today I spent my watch as the assistant engineer, so Nate and the other engineer JP spent the morning teaching me about daily and weekly system checks, how to care for a big diesel engine, and how we can fix half of the world’s problems with 21^st-century toilets. After we finished the work for the morning, I was able to ask Nate the story behind Love and Gratitude. He explained that there were lots of reasons why it’s written all over. He says that giving the machines love and gratitude will make them run smoother and last longer. I know that every time I go into the forward machinery space, the notes remind me that love and gratitude should be at the center of my thoughts as I move throughout the day. No matter what your interpretation is, out here in the middle of the ocean, there is so much to love and so much to be grateful for.

I love the way Venus, Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn are aligned in the eastern sky before the crescent moon is chased above the horizon by the rising sun. I love laughing with my watchmates in the main salon at 0045 while cramming in midnight snacks in preparation for dawn watch. I loved lying on top of the jib and the JT on the bow sprit with my best friends in Palmyra, learning the constellations as they rotated through the clear equatorial sky.

I’m grateful for my mates and scientists, who have taught me so much about sail handling, celestial navigation, CTD deployments, and how to titrate for alkalinity in 10-foot waves. I’m so grateful for the amazing and unexpected friends that I have made on this insane journey. Most importantly, I’m grateful for my friends and family back home in Florida, who have supported my dreams of becoming an ocean scientist for all these years.

With Love and Gratitude,

-Mark Leone

Breathe

 

Its been simple life.
No essence of time, days, weeks.
I just am.
Me & Ocean

It has just been our crew and the ocean for days without an end. Wherever we look out on deck we can only see a sparkling blue ocean filled with magic and mystery, surrounding us 360 degrees. This blue ocean constantly reflects our universe, our sky, our land, ourselves. We have been tasked to learn about this constantly changing body of water since the first day of Stanford at Sea to engender change and conserve its beauty. We have learnt about the ocean through all kinds of scientific research methodologies, such as hydro casts, transects, videos, meter net toes, etc. However, through my endless staring competition with the blue body of water and my deep gazing trying to understand all of its layers, I certainly have grown my curiosity and my ambition to understand: Who are we? Why are we here? What is our place in this world? Why have we become out of touch with our ocean and land?

The blue magical waves have been a constant reminder of how we have complicated our lives as humans and have not had a moment to just stand still and respect our planet Earth. On land there are moments where life gets so busy that we forget the essentials of life. We have become dependent to our advanced technological tools and have lost ourselves within it. We have become numb to the beautiful and dark parts of our world, where we have never been satisfied with what we have and who we are. We have quickly lost touch of our planet earth to a point where we have even forgotten to just breathe. However, on day 28 I am reminded once again by our ocean to stand still on this rocking vessel and just breathe, slowly, becoming one with the moving water.

I steered the boat at the helm sailing across the Pacific Ocean at a course order of 005 at 7 knots. I marked the ·2000· nautical mile that the Robert C. Seamans has traveled throughout the Pacific Ocean during our Stanford at Sea journey. We all cheered as we reached this great milestone, making it feel like the change of the 20^th to the 21^st century. This was a mark of change where we have been growing into a new skin, as scientists, sailors, and inhabitants of this planet. We have been facing many ups and downs literally and figuratively where at the end of the day all that we have is us and the sea, leaving us to think about a lot of things.

To sail the open seas, we constantly interact and think about the wind, the water, the sun, the moon, the currents, the birds, and marine animals. This constant state of consciousness, brings us back to our center, connects us to nature and our emotions, helps us find our balance, but most importantly it creates a state of love and gratitude–as Nate (the chief engineer) would say–it is the essence of life. I am reminded that we are part of nature and that we must find balance with ourselves once again. We have been able to connect with ourselves and with each other by getting grounded to our roots and respecting where we came from: the ocean.

We have begun to live in the moment on this boat, free of technology and other external stresses making us appreciate the little things. Truly creating time a verb that is relative, that stays us away from living in the moment. I have finally fallen in love with simplicity and being timeless, letting go my necessity to be busy all the time. But then…. there was gally. Oh, “what a day!” The sensation of simplicity quickly went away.

I had been looking forward to this day since the day that I got slightly homesick, as my mother, Yésica, is really the best cook. Yésica can magically make everyone fall in love with food, turning any bloomy day into a heavenly day. I was woken up at 5:15 am to prep for our cream of wheat breakfast with slices of a few apples–our last fresh produce. Ashley, our hero on the boat, quickly warned me of the busy day we had ahead of us, since we had to feed 40 mouths with 3 meals and 3 different snacks. Ashley taught me how to make the most out of every produce, grain of salt, and drop of oil we had access to. I learnt how to efficiently create a delicious meal, balancing speed and quality. Most importantly, I learnt the magic of cooking: how one can puzzle together random broken parts of a recipe into a sublime masterpiece. Everything was going quite smooth for us in the morning until dinner came around.

We caught a fish the day before to learn about the anatomy, realizing nature is the true teacher to any engineering mystery. We decided to use what was left from the fish to create a delicious Asian meal. However, this quickly became one of the most hectic days at sea. We had five cooks, Ashley, Dr. Barb, Shaili, Tanvi and myself in a 3x3 meter kitchen with less than an hour to provide a delicious and nutritious meal for forty people. We all had to move quickly around the kitchen and be on the same wavelength with every cooking motion. The pressure was on. We all had different visions on how to marinate the fish and the salad, so we all had to swiftly come to a compromise. We were able to quickly get our acts together and work as a moving team. I sprinkled out all of my mom’s special Asian recipes to create a sesame aioli, a soy dressing for the salad, and a marinating sauce for the fish. We became silly as we grilled and chopped, laughing together as Barb transformed the skin of the fish into an artful wearable fashion piece. At the end of cooking this meal I rang the bell for dinner, dancing my way across the boat singing for people to reunite for our Asian fusion dinner. I had a permanent smile on my face, since my favorite part about the day was to gather and talk to everyone (we never really get the chance to be all together and chat due to our standing watch rotation).

Sitting down to eat with my everyone quickly got rid of every inch of my homesickness I had been dragging, as we laughed about the smallest things and were present with each other. It was love and gratitude present in the air, making everyone feel blessed to be together in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I was reminded once again the value of cooking that mi madre always alluded to: bringing people together. It was again, the simple things that brought us joy.

This vessel has been a place of challenges, transformation, and growth; however, most importantly it has been a place filled with pure magic in the middle of the Pacific Ocean allowing us to grow in every direction. The ocean and I have slowly become one as the days have gone by.

I have embraced the simple life.

I just am.

Finally breathing once again.

Stop.

Breathe.

P.S.

1. Acknowledgment: This blog was inspired from many of my beautiful conversations with Nate Bears, our chief engineer. He kept reminding me throughout this sea journey to get in touch with oneself, appreciate every moment, find harmony with nature, and to stop and breathe. But most importantly be filled with love and gratitude.

2. Thank you to all 39 members who have pushed my growing and helped me grow into Anna@Sea. Thank you for becoming my home away from home.

3. Feliz Cumpleaños mami. Te extraño muchísimo. Estoy pensando en ti cada día y soñando en abrazarte pronto. Agradecida cada día de tenerte en mi vida.

Full Circle

“Camille, take this moment in, you’ll likely never be here again” is a phrase I often said to myself 9 years ago. And yet, someway, somehow, I am magically “here” again. I am aboard the SSV Robert C Seamans once more. Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean - I stopped trying to keep track since we left Palmyra. But, this time, for the first time in my life, I am no longer a student. I am Dr., with a soon to be fully conferred PhD and a postdoc at Stanford. Most importantly, a teacher and a mentor to a pretty remarkable group of students. 

It’s been a little surreal. From the moment I stepped aboard, the memories started flowing in. Life aboard the Bobby C hasn’t changed much since my last residence. It was pretty entertaining watching the students discover what I now remember so vividly. Despite my last time on this ship being the best 6.5 consecutive weeks of my life, this is no pleasure cruise. We are the crew, the scientists, the janitors, etc. aboard this ship. There’s always something that needs to be done to ensure that Bobby, your shipmates and yourself are in working order.

No longer at the whims of the watch maker, I am an “Other”, free of standing watch in the middle of the night, but expected to set my own schedule except for a 6 am wakeup call I have been promptly ignoring since day 5. With this “otherhood” comes a “promotion” to what I am calling the “Sweat Cabin.” A bunk in a stateroom, hanging from the ceiling, with no rail to keep me in… Every night is an adventure. I have to fight the tack to just get into my bunk and hope that the heat doesn’t melt me. Barb did warn me – she says she has measured 92 deg F in that bunk. As a Canadian and religious follower of the metric system, I have no idea how hot that is, but I know it’s too hot for a human to live. Yes, for a Canadian who once wore gloves on a beach in the Caribbean because she was cold, I have finally found a temperature that is too hot.

Most of my days consist of insuring that students have everything they need to complete their research projects. We have 9 different projects ongoing. Each unique in its scope, the students’ and their projects have challenged me to draw knowledge from my now completed education in oceanography. I am pulling out old textbooks and lecture notes from classes I took 6 years ago to try to help them explain the phenomenon they are observing. I am amazed every day at the quality of the research being done by students, many of whom had never taken an ocean science course only 9 weeks ago! I am very proud of all of them and can’t wait to see the final products this Saturday and Sunday.

While most of my time aboard has been spent reminiscing, I have been able to remedy my only regret from my student experience. While I had the privilege to sail Bobby from San Diego to Tahiti as a student, there’s another sailing vessel that I never had a chance to take out. Gene.

A two sail, single mast, sailboat that lives starboard, midships on Bobby, Gene is named after Bobby’s wife. Most of the time, she is a storage container for the laundry buckets, fishing rods, tagging mats, cinderblocks, rope and buoys. Her use blocked by the rescue boat that sits on top of her. But at Palmyra, Gene came off the deck and was placed into the water.

After letting some students get the first spin, I finally got my chance. I asked Kanoe, one of the two student “captains” along with Sydney, which one of them would provide a safe time and which one of them would provide a fun time. Kanoe didn’t hesitate. Neither of them would guarantee a safe passage, but both would ensure a fun time. And what ensued was certainly fun.

**--Dear Parents, reading this – there is a happy ending to this story, no one was ever in grave danger and all souls are safe.--**

Kanoe, Kelly and I boarded Gene one late afternoon in Palmyra. All of the small boats powered by motors were away on snorkeling missions. The captain of Bobby, Greg, gave us permission to go out for a sail on Gene. He handed us a radio and told us not to go far. A squall (i.e., a storm at sea) was coming in. With our captain Kanoe forward, Kelly in the middle on the staysail sheets and me aft in charge of both the tiler and the mainsail sheet, we set sail around Bobby in Palmyra.

It took a little bit to get used to. I, at 5’7”, am a little too tall and have to get completely horizontal on the floor of Gene to pass sails to change directions. But eventually, we were flying, picking up speed, jibing, tacking. Nothing could stop us. We made circles around Bobby. We were having the time of our lives. An hour and a half in, Kelly and I changed roles. We continued to fly, until we got what we thought was a brilliant idea…

With so many incredible research projects, there were never enough boats to do science. We all wondered, given our excellent seamanship so far, could we use Gene to do science? Could we stop Gene on a station, do a CTD cast and get back underway? Surely, if we wanted to do this, we would need to be able to demonstrate our abilities. We all agreed to try. Let’s douse (i.e., bring down) all the sails. And stay on “station” and put them back up. We were doing great. Nothing would stop us now. We tried over the radio to tell the crew on Bobby what we were attempting to do. No answer. Oh well. Let’s move Gene to be in view of Bobby when we experiment to make sure that we could be saved if anything were to happen.

We doused the sails. Success! We were kind of staying in the same location! We got a call over the radio asking us if everything was alright. We answered that this was all part of the plan. The small boats came back and passed us on the way to returning our shipmates from their snorkeling. We told them all that we are ok. That everything was under control… We were so proud of ourselves that we hadn’t noticed that we had started to drift! We were approaching the shore! We scrambled to put the sails back up and turn…

SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRATCH

It was certainly not a pleasant sound as the bottom of Gene touched something. We tried desperately to stop Gene’s momentum by dousing the sails and using the oars with no success. Kanoe hoped out to stop her. At last, Gene had stopped and we were now in the middle of a shallow, ankle deep sand/coral flat. We all hoped out and walked Gene back to deeper waters, where our expert tow by Heather (1^st mate) and Nate (chief engineer) was waiting for us.

Most of the quarterdeck of the Seamans was filled with observers, enjoying our little adventure. We got the tow of shame back to the Seamans. And there’s photographic evidence…

To all those reading, all souls are accounted for, including Gene’s. She fine. Barely a mark on her. Now back midships on Bobby and back to being a storage locker. We made apology cards for all of our rescuers and most importantly, for Gene herself. Gene received a variety of apology haikus from KCK (Kanoe, Camille & Kelly).

After much discussion amongst ourselves and the professional crew of the Seamans upon our return, we learned where we went wrong and a hell of a lot about sailing. With this experience, I’ve finally come full circle with my time aboard the RCS.

Now, with our final few days of S-303 approaching, I find myself saying again, “Camille, take this moment in, you’ll never be here again.”

Dr. Coconut Camille (S-250, S-303)

Shapes in the Shadows

Sometimes I think I see things moving in the water. I think I see shapes churning in the shadows behind the boat and wings unfurling just beneath the bow. Other times, I think I see forms reaching out of the waves on the horizon.

The glances I have of these forms are always short-lived—just fleeting motions like swallows darting across the sky. The forms initially appear to me as birds or whales, and I try hard to define them, but when these initial forms fade, I’m left staring out over the open ocean again, wondering if I’d seen anything at all—wondering if it was just a trick of the light.

It’s been challenging, during these last few weeks, to adapt to the constant transitions of life at sea. I’ve felt a steady wind of emotions that have, at times, left me feeling unsettled. My body’s responses to the sea have not always been kind. Periods of work and rest happen at odd intervals, and consistency has evaded me completely. Every moment is a moment of transition. Moments are never quite aligned—never quite full or regular or part of something that falls into place.

As we reach the end of our passage, I find it difficult to define myself in this period of constant transition. But, in the uncertainty of being undefined, I’ve grown to feel some freedom. It’s a form of relief to be unbounded and intimately at the whim of something greater. Here, I am separate from my habits and the comforts of my life on land—I am separate from myself, in a way, and the constraints I impose on myself.

As I’ve grown more comfortable here, I’ve started to see the moments that blossom in the transitory light. I feel the warm hands on my back comforting me, the pride in my growing callouses, and the power of being at the helm of the ship. I’m embraced by that soft and rich orange color of the early morning light. I’m entranced by the waves at night that live in a black and white haze of motion. And I’m captivated by the visitors we receive, which, while few, are of immense beauty—the passing clouds, the quick but forceful squalls, and the sea birds that swirl around our boat.

I’d like very much to define this time for myself—to abstract it away into some line that I can relay to my friends or some blurb for my resume. I’d like, too, to be able to capture the moments of light I feel so deeply that live in this boundless space. I’d like to hold the songs sung under a blaze of stars, the sleep deprived smiles, and the little moments of peace for as long as I can. But I have as little luck in capturing the moments of light as I do in trying to make out shapes in the ocean—or in trying to hear my name in the movement of the wind. It all eludes me.

So, I’ve settled, for now, on savoring the light as it passes.

Diego Rafael Perez

A Great Oceanic Eye

Sometime after midnight, bioluminescence comes into full bloom. Flecks of dinoflagellate-produced light flicker on the inky waves, disappearing as quickly as they appear, like a magic trick, a wink, a blink of a great oceanic eye. During my last dawn watch, I paused for a moment as force 4 winds blew in from the southeast, sending whispers of stratocumulus clouds across the sky. A set of steep stairs took me down into the red-lit charthouse, and I braced my legs against the rolling ship, the handrails I helped re-tighten with the engineers two weeks ago still solid under my grip.

It’s strange how accustomed we’ve all become to this ship, to this place that is both voyage and home, how quickly we’re getting used to six-hour watches separated by twelve hours of sleeping, eating, and whatever else we can fit in. Nothing stays still on this ship. Things spill, tip, and fall over all the time. Bodies collide, sometimes with metal or wood, oftentimes with each other.

Our days are marked by the time we wake and the time we go to sleep. Sometimes we close our eyes and sink into our bunks when the sun is just rising and wake up at a different latitude, rain pouring down on the quarterdeck. Another ITCZ squall. We eat our meals on gimbaled tables and seem to know—most of the time—where to put our elbows, a plate, a bowl of sloshing soup. There are days when we forget where we are and it’s okay. We learn to patch up our wounds, let our bruises heal, clean up our messes with multicolored microfiber towels from the closet.

And yet what I find strangest of all is how everything at sea is at once a contradiction: beautiful and hard, time suspended and time flowing, everything moving as water does, inconstantly and infinitely.

Crossing the Pacific, the ocean becomes a sound, a smell, a swell, a memory, a curse, a tease, a song, a burning blue. It calls upon a system of inhuman time, cycles of unknowable depths and immeasurable wonders, a pelagic mystery, an alien universe. Over these past three weeks, the ocean has constituted, at least for me, both journey and destination, beginning and closing, new and old patterns of who I thought I was and am, all coursing over the pour of liquid distances.

The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once wrote that “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” Whether or not Kierkegaard ever spent much time on a tall ship like the Robert C Seamans, I’ve been coming back to this quote as I realize how hard—and perhaps impossible—it is to reflect on an experience as it’s happening. Instead, what we end up understanding about a time or experience becomes understood afterwards, when connections coalesce from scattered dots of observation and patterns of perception become a line, a circle, a spiral, a shape. Certain moments, interactions, and encounters take a form and color as intense and inconstant as the shifting sea.

So what can one say?

I suppose I could talk about the first time I dove into the coral reefs at Palmyra Atoll with my lovely friend and research partner Jessie.

Beneath the teal tropical waters, we swam through a world composed of streaks of motion—triggerfish, tangs, blennies, sharks, mantas, and parrotfish chomping on the corals. Jessie and I deployed three hydrophones across the coral reefs at Palmyra for our bioacoustics project, recording over one-hundred and fifty-six hours of sounds. Camille, our TA and project mentor, nearly wept as we huddled around her laptop the next evening and passed the headphones around, listening to a chorus of crepuscular fish calling into the coral midnight.

I suppose I could also talk about how I’ve come to love the glow of a sunrise over open ocean. Or how, during the few hours before twilight, breaking waves sound like soft breaths punctuating the quiet night. Of course, among these moments of beauty are the more difficult ones, too, like finding a way to make peace with stubborn layers of sea and sweat on the skin, a persistent queasiness in the stomach, a dull longing for loved ones on land. We take so much for granted that only when some things are stripped away do we see how much they mean to us.

A year ago, I was working as a wooden boatbuilding apprentice in midcoast Maine. I wore brown Carhartt overalls which became stained with varnish and emerald marine paint. Despite hundreds of hours of working with boards of pine and cedar, chiseling and restoring various sailboats, canoes, and dinghies, I never got to see what ultimately became of them, where they ended up going, what they saw, whose lives they intercepted.

I certainly never imagined that I would be where I am today, writing to you from a tall ship in the central Pacific Ocean. Did the makers of the RCS think about all the students it would carry, all the places it would go? What kinds of understanding it would bring forth?

The first time I climbed aloft onto the mainmast, I found myself high above the birds circling around the ship. I paused as I made my way to the top, looking down on everyone below me moving between watches, between tasks, between moments. Everyone on this ship, from the captain to steward to engineers to mates to scientists to students, contributes in their own way to this voyage and experience. We are each and all part of something greater than ourselves, moving forward, moving with the rhythm of the sea.

In his night orders to the evening and dawn watches, captain Greg writes a message with instructions for the night, reminding us always to remain vigilant and alert. Being vigilant and alert are critical to maintaining the safety of the ship, and to these, I would also add remaining patient, brave, and above all, kind.

Our voyage is mostly behind us, but there are still a few more precious, difficult days ahead of us as we sail back to Honolulu. If life can only be understood backwards, then it must be lived forwards, just as our ship propels itself forwards in accordance with the winds and weather, invoking forces much more powerful than our individual selves.

-Regina Kong

Bottle Overboard!

Maitri

It was a quiet morning aboard the Robert C. Seamans. Following a night of squalls, we were drifting near Kingman Reef, awaiting Captain’s orders on where to go next. After finishing up morning chores, I was tasked with being on bow watch, which entails keeping a sharp look out for any signs of traffic or foul weather. The sun had just risen, casting a fiery glow on the steely gray waters around us. I clipped into the bow and took in my beautiful surroundings. As I began humming a song, I leaned over ever so slightly to look at the sun’s reflection on the water. Suddenly I felt something snap. To my utter dismay, I realized that my water bottle, which was clipped into my harness, had broken loose of its string and fallen past the bowsprit straight into the ocean. I watched the hunk of red metal bob up and down and then begin to lazily drift along the port side of our boat. I quickly informed my watch officer Vuk of the situation and soon a group of my shipmates had gathered with a fish net valiantly attempting to scoop my bottle out of the water. But alas, the net fell a mere inch short and soon the bottle was completely out of our reach. As people began to give up and leave, Vuk said with a grave tone, “You have to let it go, Maitri,” and as if to rub (sea) salt into my wounds, added “Don’t do that again.”

Water bottle-less and defeated, I returned to the bow to resume my lookout. Since we weren’t sailing or motoring, I spent the next hour hopelessly watching my water bottle drift further and further away with the current. I reflected on my history with the bottle. Years ago, my mother gave it to me back home in India. The bottle travelled with me halfway across the world and together we experienced grueling college classes, hikes, beach days, tumbles into waterfalls with friends, camping trips, and most recently, a seafaring voyage across the Pacific Ocean. And now, it seemed my water bottle was ready to embark on a solo adventure. With my shipmates’ support, I began to imagine what its future would look like. Maybe it would sink to the bottom of the ocean and become the new shell of a gigantic hermit crab. Maybe it would wash ashore some remote island and be discovered hundreds of years from now by archaeologists who would use cutting-edge technology to decipher the tattered sparkly stickers on the bottle, reading “Of Course I’m a Feminist!” and “Go with the Flow.” Maybe it would be found by someone who had been stranded on an island for days and the freshwater in it would hold them over until their rescue helicopter arrived. At the end of the hour, I had somewhat come to terms with my loss. My role for the next hour was as helmsperson and I quickly swung into action as the Captain gave us new course orders. As I began to turn right, a glinting light in the ocean caught my eye. Was it just a wave crest? A trick of the light? I stared at the glint again and, could it be?

“It’s my water bottle!” I exclaimed.

Tanvi

After a long dawn watch shift, I had stayed to watch the sun spread over the sky while my beloved crewmates from A Watch took the helm. For the last hour, I had seen the grief in Maitri’s eyes as she mourned the loss of her water bottle. More than a container for fresh water, the distinctive red water bottle had come to symbolize so much more in its association with Maitri – a symbol of progressive ideology, a reminder of her love for the ocean, a key support for physical health. I had admired, too, how bravely Maitri had moved on from the bottle’s tragic demise, taking helm even through her pain. Maitri, who had given so much to us all in the last three weeks, had lost something important today.

When I heard her cry, I knew this was my chance to finally give back to Maitri, the boat’s font of generosity. Springing into action with my instincts honed from all our man overboard drills, I scanned the horizon for the water bottle till I saw the red spark that had drawn Maitri’s eye. I raised my hand and pointed at it. In the background, I heard Maitri beg Vuk to return for her water bottle. Finally, the stern Serbian relented and gave the fated order: “Ten degrees right rudder.” I kept pointing as the boat began to turn – back towards the water bottle, back towards hope once more. Even though my arm began to ache, even though my eyes burned with the sun, even though the three feet swells threatened to hide the bottle from view forever, I kept my whole body trained on the bottle. Steadfast crewmate Jessie kept my company even as our muscles burned. I called on all my training as a designated spotter in an emergency situation to keep me going.

I saw the bottle shift towards our port side and keeping a visual fix on where I’d seen it last, I sprang into action towards the science deck, the only place in the boat low enough to fish the bottle from the water with a net. There, I joined the esteemed JP and Nate Bears, engineers extraordinaire, already prepared with nets for retrieval. With bated breath, we watched the bottle bob towards us. It glinted in the sun. With the chaotic, turbulent waters of the ITCZ, every swell threatened to take it further away from us, not closer. But I kept hope because I knew everything the bottle meant. Finally, it came just close enough and with a mighty swoop, Nate scooped it from the water in one deft motion with a Zen-like calmness honed through his 5 am breathing exercises. He triumphantly held the water bottle aloft, plucked from Davy Jones’ blue clutches, and from the quarter deck I heard Maitri utter a shriek of victory. I could feel the joy in her heart and I was honored to have been a small part of it.

Quotes

“You know, ‘I said in jest, oh Maitri, you should go on helm and steer us to your water bottle, haha’ and then, she did” – Dakota

“Clearly if a man goes overboard, they can be saved”

“Maitri should not be trusted with a small child that is water bottle sized at bow watch” – Camille

“This is the best steering I’ve seen from Maitri the entire trip. A fine display of bottle, ship, shipmate, self.” – Shaili

“It’s symbolic of something.” – Regina

“Don’t make this a big deal.” – Captain Greg

How Big Is the Ocean?

On a boat headed nowhere, we begin to talk about teleportation. It’s dawn watch, the six hour shift from 1 am to 7 am where the largest event is watching the first lights come to the horizon and the stars wheel out of sight, and we’re two days’ sailing away from Palmyra Atoll and hovering a few miles away from Kingman Reef. There’s more science to do here, more things to uncover in the water, and our only task tonight is to remain within a set box on the map. The Intertropical Convergence Zone has dipped down to our latitudes and the seas have flattened out. An hour ago we gave up on steering and left the helm to itself so our watch can gather on the quarterdeck and drink tea (or, in my case, my latest attempt at improvised hot chocolate – hot water, nondairy creamer, and a spoonful of Nutella). The engine’s off and the sails are down and we talk in low voices while the boat drifts through the equatorial Pacific.

We talk about what super power we’d choose, given the choice, and someone suggests teleportation. Wouldn’t it be cool to Apparate (“Wait, guys, what’s Apparation? I don’t get it,” Lilah says) from place to place with just a thought? I’m surprised at how viscerally I reject the idea. Two weeks away from Honolulu, the two flights I’ll have to take to get home are becoming more real before me, and the many journeys beyond that to get where I’ll need to go. Everything would be easier if I could disappear somewhere, reappear somewhere else. But embedded in the question of teleportation is also the question of why we’re here, now, on a boat with no direction. A flight to Palmyra is two hours and we spent two weeks travelling the same distance. In every nautical mile we cover, the aphorism echoes: the value is in the journey, not the destination.

But what has it meant to go somewhere out here? I expected to spend every second on the boat overawed by the size of the ocean and its vast unknowability. Instead I’m surprised at now, three weeks in, how familiar it all feels. Rather than a foreign expanse, the waves until the horizon feel almost intimate in their companionable repetition. Each swell is framed within the same metal poles of the awning, the netted triangle of the bowsprit, the curved hull of Gene, the curved shape of Wayne’s World, the fishing poles on the quarterdeck, the contours of the tubas, the large cream wings of the sails in their various configurations –the stays’ls, double-reefed main, the jib, the jib tops’l, or all doused, the sails rising and falling with the wind around us – the ocean is drawn out for us, always, in the outlines of the boat we’ve circled hundreds of times in the last three weeks and have sweated on and cried on and laughed on and sung on and grown to live and love in so many ways. When I come up on deck every morning and go to the rail and look out (morning being a relative term, defined at any time between the hours of 1 to 11 am), it’s not awe I feel but a rush of quiet recognition. Oh, it’s you again. The horizon-line is a belt cinched at our waist, as much a part of our vessel as the wood of the helm.

How do we know we’re going somewhere at all? If not for the numbers we collect every hour in our boat and science checks, with the evidence of our minds and bodies there’s only the subtlest of signals: our shadows switch directions as we pass from one side of the sun’s ecliptical to the other. The Southern Cross fixes itself just beyond the bowsprit. Night by night the moon stays up for longer in the sky, and then shrinks once more. Each sign is easier to miss than the last, when I don’t pay attention, and it’s the simplest thing to forget to, as I move from helm to lookout, coiling my lines and palming my turns, watching the chlorophyll samples drain with the hum of the vacuum pump in the background. When Palmyra emerged on the horizon, it was a shock to have a new shape there, and as we motored into the lagoon, pressed against the sides of the boat, part of my gaping incredulity at the fabulous green islands and beaches and sharks and rays came from the realization that there could be something else around us. That we had, in fact, changed our place in the world. A few days out, I’m still not convinced that the days basking in the sun-warmed shallows there weren’t all just a pleasant shared dream.

Part of what I’m learning out here is how to pay attention to the signs of place in the ocean, in the calming of the waves as we enter the lee of a reef, in the appearance and disappearance of boobies wheeling around us (and occasionally getting too close for some people’s comfort), in the changing directions of the winds we track every hour, in the declination of the sun and stars. It’s a new vocabulary I am only just familiarizing myself with and it will take lifetimes to learn fully, to be able to read the world around me and place myself precisely within it.

But part of what I’m learning, also, is that going somewhere here is not the same as what I’m used to on land. The ocean’s expanse is not the same as walking across an expanse of mountains of land, as standing atop a peak and looking out and feeling in your limbs the size of it all compared to your own body and everything it would take from you to cross it. It’s another dawn watch discussion from some weeks ago: is the ocean big or small? In lab at 1 am, we were divided on the matter.  I maintained the ocean is small, or at least smaller than I expected. More people agreed with me than I expected. When you look out into the ocean’s distance here you know anything there will be in reach within a half hour, if not less; it’s the basis of our strict lookouts, that any vessel in the vicinity presents a possibility for collision in a much shorter time than you expect. And when you add up half an hour on half an hour on half an hour and entire degrees of latitude are disappearing behind you in a few days, how big could this all be, really?

The true answer, which I see every time I plot our position on the chart, is mind-bogglingly, dizzyingly, frighteningly vast, so large we haven’t seen another boat once, that meters-long fish become toys among the waves, anything we drop off the boat vanishes from sight in minutes, so truly, spectacularly enormous we probably won’t see another boat till we’re within a few nautical miles of Honolulu once more. The biggest difference between seeing scale here and seeing scale on land is responsibility. When you’re going somewhere on land, most often it’s a solitary or small group effort. You can feel how big it is because you’re the person covering the distance; you’re comparing the size of it to your own body. Here, one among a crew of forty, the ocean’s size is compared against everything the forty of us build to together. The scales may feel small because most of the time it feels like I’m not doing much of anything to go anywhere. But out of sight it’s adding up, mile by mile and boat check by boat check. With ten of us to hoist the mains’l each person only puts a few seconds of effort in. But by the end of it a ton of sail has been lifted against gravity. That it will all assemble into a concrete whole is an act of trust. But it’s trust that’s paid off until now.  

Yesterday, we reached the southernmost point of our voyage and prepared to turn around. During our daily gathering, we held hands in a circle as the waves broke over Kingman Reef in the distance, an echo of the first day of class when we stood in a much smaller group by the shores of Monterey and tried to imagine this moment. It’s 1500 nautical miles since then. I’m trying to look at my line-calloused hands and the Teva tan on my feet and remind myself: we’ve gone somewhere since then. I’m looking up at the horizon and remembering: we have more to go. 

Tanvi Dutta Gupta

P.S. Neel, I know I’m a few days early, but happy graduation! I hope it goes well and I can’t wait to hear all about it and celebrate with you and Mama and Dada and Luchi and Kala Didi.

Hello from Kingman Reef!

After spending yesterday afternoon capturing stunning videos of some curious sharks on the reef using the ROV and an evening enduring some wet & windy (40 knots) squalls, it’s cleared up to be a blue-sky day here on the RCS. In fact, today’s been full of excitement – we’re talking a water bottle overboard rescue (“this is not a drill!” – blog to come on that tomorrow), tagging three tunas, and celebrating the birthday of our very own steward, Ashley!

You may be wondering how we’re getting by out here on the sea – what’s filling our bellies? How many meals are we eating a day? How are we surviving without our Starbucks and other comfort foods? Are we catching fish for dinner? While we did catch our first, second and third tunas of the trip within the last 24 hours (all yellowfin tuna!!), we caught them for research and released them back into the ocean after tagging them for science.

But don’t worry, our bellies are full, the galley (kitchen) is most people’s favorite space on the ship and we couldn’t be luckier to be graced with the warm & humorous presence, radiant smile and unparalleled focaccia making & wooden spoon whittling skills of our steward (chef), Ashley. Ashley does much more than fill our bellies with food. Being assigned a day in the galley working as Ashley’s assistant steward as part of our watch rotation schedule is the most highly coveted job on the ship. In fact, it’s one of the most highly bartered things on this vessel (aside from midrats). When you’re assistant steward, you get to dream up delicious meals with all the flavors you’ve been craving, take occasional trips to the reefer to grab some veggies (and linger a little longer to cool your body temperature down a couple degrees), and of course, sit on the galley stools and chat about life (or boat gossip) with Ashley. Long story short: Happy birthday, Ashley! We love you!!! Simply put, you’re such a delight.

An Ode to Ashley, Our Galley Queen:

What a Day!

In the wee hours of the morning, our queen rises from her bunk, slips her apron over her head, and gravitates towards the coffee station.

Dawn Watch has completed their mission – brew a fresh pot of coffee before Ashely wakes up: Check!

As the sun’s rays begin to peek above the horizon and glisten through the galley portholes, our queen is already perched in front of the griddle.

As she turns up the heat, she chuckles to herself remembering the dance move that A Watch and Duncan taught her last night – the griddy. She scrambles the eggs and flips the bacon as she rehearses the steps in her head, preparing for her next Swizzle performance.

She eyes the hutch, where last night’s “midrat” (midnight snacks) containers lay picked bare. The cookie bars, of course, were a hit once again.

Moments later, Dawn Watch is graced by the presence of our queen on the quarterdeck. Everyone pauses for a minute to feel the warm light of the sunrise break through the layer of cumulus stratus on the horizon, to listen to the faint flap of the sail as it luffs with the gentle gusting winds, and to breath in the blend of salty sea spray and bacon wafting up from the galley.

Someone turns to our queen Ashley, points their finger towards the sky and exclaims, “Delight!” – a gratitude practice she has spread amongst the ship’s co.

After the brief sunrise appreciation is over, Queen Ashley returns to the galley to ensure that no one has been snack jacking.

Just as she steps into the galley, the ship surges forwards & backwards, left & right, up & down all at once, causing a raucous crash of pots and pans and all other loose miscellaneous items.

An unattended cup of hot chocolate unfortunately left on an un-gimbled table goes tumbling to the floor.

“Sole towel sole towel sole towel!” The nearest idle hands rush to the cleaning locker to retrieve a towel to clean the mess from the floor before it spreads with the rolling of the ship.

Our queen, observing from her galley throne, looks on to the commotion in the salon.

She taps into her sixth sense and knows that it’s going to be a day of rough seas (confirmed also by the radar in the doghouse).

The assistant steward enters the galley, proudly dawns the lime green rooster apron, and locks eyes with the queen. They give each other a nod to acknowledge the high likelihood of hip bruises from bracing themselves against countertops, pruney fingers from washing dishes and inevitable pit stains.

On a day like today, Queen Ashley considers choosing a recipe that is simple and time efficient, such as ramen.

Sigh   She remembers that the social snackers have blown through the ramen stockpile weeks ago

Plan B: maybe a quick and easy PB&J sandwich bar? Nope, the peanut butter ration is running low too… She thinks to herself, “Dang, either these Stanford students need to work on their self-control, or I really need to put a padlock on the snack cabinet.”

Luckily, our Queen can step up to any challenge, and within a couple of hours, she has prepped one of the hardiest, most nourishing meals of all our lives.

We leave the gimbled tables feeling rejuvenated, connected to one another after some meal-time laughter, and full of delight.

It’s safe to say that our queen Ashley, as well as the entire ship’s co, can go to bed tonight (or this morning or this afternoon), letting out an accomplished sigh, saying “what a day!”

-Jessie Kaull

Editor's note: we had some technical difficulties with this post, so it is a bit out of sequence here, having been written on 5/26 when the ship was still at Kingman Reef. Sorry for any confusion this causes!

Falling in Love

Today concludes our stay at Palmyra. In this moment, preparing to leave the comfort of the lagoon, I feel as if I am leaving something very special behind.

I think it's fair to say that many aboard the RC Seamans have fallen in love with Palmyra. The gorgeous tropical reefs and sparkling beaches tickle the hearts of even the saltiest of our sailors. I, however, am in a more unique predicament. I have fallen in love on Palmyra.

I first saw her on the beach. She was there when our group stepped ashore, gazing out over the ocean like Poseidon's daughter, one with the sea. Struck by her beauty, my eyes briefly met hers. I looked away in embarrassment, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw she too turned red.

After some internal deliberation, I finally gathered the courage to approach her. I walked up to her, still sitting on the beach, and introduced myself.

To my horror, she looked at me with fear and started to back away. What had I done wrong? Was it something in the tone of my voice? Was I being too forward? In a moment of sudden clarity, I realized my mistake. Crouching, I leaned back onto my hands, and side by side we began to stroll down the glistening reef flats.

I'll admit, my lover was rather shy. Despite my efforts to lead conversation, we always deferred back to content silence. As I see it, our special bond transcended words - we spoke only the language of love. As we walked, we drew closer and closer, our steps falling into a harmonious rhythm. Perhaps it was the equatorial heat, but I could feel my chest fill with warmth. She too, became livelier, increasingly opening up and coming out of her shell. Before long we were dancing together in the sand, frolicking with unbridled joy. Minutes turned to hours as we basked among the coconuts and coral. Cupid's arrow had struck me firmly in the heart.

As the sun began to draw closer to the horizon, I realized my time with my newfound love was setting too. Soon, the boats would arrive at the dock, tearing us apart. Dark clouds formed overhead, and we were quickly overtaken by a violent squall. I fell to my knees in the muddy sand and cursed the sky, pleading with whatever cruel force of nature had brought us together, only to separate us with such haste. The sky's sole response was more thunder, a mocking laugh to my misery.

Struggling to hold back tears, I tenderly lifted my soulmate and placed her in the palm of my hand. Peering into her eyestalks, I could see that she was similarly devastated. Holding her pincer between my fingers, I whispered consoling words, knowing full well that my promises were empty. As the life boat whisked me away, I watched the elegant outline of her shell disappear into the rain.

I suppose it was doomed to fail from the beginning. I, a boy from a small town in West Michigan, and she, a stunning Palmyran Strawberry Hermit Crab.

Star-crossed, in every sense, yet connected by some deeper force. Even now, as our ship undertakes its journey northward, I scan the horizon for signs of her. My eyes are met with nothing but empty blue ocean. Such is the tragedy of the boy and the crab.

With great sorrow,

Dakota Riemersma

Palmyra Review

5/18: As we motored through the narrow channel into Palmyra’s west lagoon, we were greeted by a group of 6 Mantas performing barrel rolls along the port side of the RCS. A single grey reef shark swam a few meters alongside us just as we cruised out of the channel. Later that day, a few of us rode the defender to the the Nature Conservancy’s research station, where we took our first steps on land in 3 weeks. After hiking through sand flats filled with brilliant yellow butterfly fish, banded snake eels, and more hermit crabs than any of us had ever seen, we emerged out of the forest onto a pristine swimming hole. Maitri, Mark, and I snorkeled around the clearing, as Drive and Dakota took turns taking off a rope swing into the crystal-clear water. At one point, I climbed a slanted palm tree about 12 feet above the swimming area, and watched my first blacktip reef shark of the trip cruise directly beneath me, just a few feet from the swimmers. Our time on Palmyra would be very different from that spent on the high seas.

5/19: My second day in Palmyra was my first chance to snorkel the iconic reef. The first thing I noticed about the habitat was the incredible 3-dimensionality of the corals. In addition to being vibrantly colorful, the reef, which ranged from 0 to about 15 feet in depth, was characterized by unique and intricate geometries. My snorkel buddy Dakota and I first circled the boat, taking in the sensory overload of fishes, invertebrates, and coral that we had been waiting so long to see. However, as soon as we stared down our first subadult blacktip, we had a new goal - finding as many sharks as we could. In total, we counted around 9 sharks that day. My favorite encounter was a whitetip reef shark that I intersected as we each rounded the same patch of coral. I suddenly found myself just a few feet directly above the shark, and it allowed me to follow it from above for what felt like 2-3 minutes as it cruised through coral around our site.

After returning to the boat in the afternoon, Dakota, Mark, and I climbed onto the bowsprit, where we watched two mantas cruise directly beneath us. We watched the mantas circle around the boat and under us for thirty minutes, before heading below deck for dinner. Later that night, Sydney taught me how to extract DNA from a potential anglerfish sample that we had each placed bets on.

5/20: Hiking through the sand flats and forest of Strawn Island are what I will remember most about my time in the atoll. I spent my entire third day in Palmyra traversing the uninhabited island, and finding just about every terrestrial vertebrate Palmyra had to offer. As we motored toward the island, JP pointed out a turtle 15 feet off our boat, and I knew the day would be good. Hiking alongside the water, we were greeted by juvenile blacktips on our left, and dozens boobies on our right. At one point, hundreds of mullet began jumping out of the water. It looked as if one huge mass was galloping through reef, surely being chased by a hungry blacktip.

Diego helped identify nesting brown and masked boobies, and I took some of my favorite bird photos ever on the hike. He also spotted a small gecko just off the water, and I had the chance to get a photo I’ve been imagining for a while - a small lizard on a tropical coast, with palm trees in the foreground and untouched beaches in the background. Once we had spotted many more geckos and boobies, we emerged onto a larger sand flat from which we could see the RCS in the distance. Audrey met us for lunch, bringing apples, hard-boiled eggs, peanut butter, and honey. As we all wolfed down what felt like one of the best meals of our lives, Karthik (who had brought a plastic ziplock instead of a water bottle), Mark, and I tried our hardest to open coconuts on some rocks.

Soon, Chinmay, Matt, Mia, and Jenny arrived after a successful morning Manta mission. A few of us took temperature measurements throughout the sand flat for a fun project idea we had thought about while at Hopkins. Next, the group hiked through the forest and explored a series of World War II era bunkers. Inside one of them, we found the only mature coconut crab encountered on the trip. We were all really excited for Matt, who had been excited about seeing coconut crabs for many weeks, and happily shared all the facts he knew about their life cycle.

5/21: I finally got the chance to join Chinmay and Matt on a manta mission, and we set out with high hopes to deploy a net-tow, perform CTD-casts throughout the channel, and possibly see some mantas. Although no mantas made an appearance, we all had a great time. Barb cracked jokes as the net deployment turned out to be a failure. Chinmay, Anna, Matt, and I marveled at the groups of sharks that would circle our boat every time we stopped, dipping our heads into the water to spot blacktips, red snappers, and titan triggerfish from both up close and afar. I returned to the boat excited, but wanting more than ever to see new marine animals.

5/22: Before settling on studying white shark migration to Hawaii, Mia and I had planned to study how the thermal structure of sand flats influenced blacktip shark movement. Although we didn’t get to make it a full project, we were able to spend time on our second day at Strawn setting up some cameras and taking temperature measurements across the nearest sand flat. All the other Palmyra projects had made me jealous to do science around the reef, and sampling along our transect along the flat reminded me how much I love conducting field work, and how it helps me better appreciate interesting habitats. After the transect, we spent the rest of the morning further exploring Strawn. Camille collected coconuts to bring back to the boat, and JP ventured off to photograph boobies. 

5/23: My final day in Palmyra was spent appreciating the coral reef the atoll is so well known for. I departed for Penguin Spit (our most common snorkeling destination) with Matt, Chinmay, and Karthik, and we all formed a big snorkel group as soon as we got there. On my first snorkel trip, I felt overwhelmed with all the unfamiliar animals surrounding me. However, this time I was able to focus, and take everything in. We didn’t spot as many sharks this time, but we were able to marvel at a group of massive barracuda cruising through the reef, and schools of hundreds of fishes traversing corals.

Extra: Although we have left Palmyra - the pinnacle of our voyage, our days have been anything but devoid of action. A few days ago, Mark helped reel in a 100 + lb yellowfin yuna, and we tagged three yellowfin in total. It was my favorite day of the trip. To celebrate Ashely’s birthday, we had a meal of yuna prepared in three different ways, all of which were delicious. We recently found out that eDNA samples (tirelessly collected by Tanvi, Sydney, and Shaili) from along our cruise track included ghost shark, megamouth shark, thresher shark, mako shark, blue whale and other DNA. Today was Mia’s birthday, and we celebrated with cookies and ice cream. I also reeled in our first skipjack of the voyage, which later turned into a delicious poke.

Jaden Clark

25 Way(ves) to Describe the Ocean:

.               Liquid land

.               Sea blanket

.               "Puka" (dimple of sorts) in/on a Perfect Plane

.               Mother Nature's Gatorade

.               Flooded/Fully-Filled Trench

 

.               Big Blue - Captain Greg

.               Planet Earth's Breath - Jan Whitting

.               Place of Peace, Turbulence & Turmoil

.               Molecule & Mineral

.               City of Stars

 

.               Moving Mountaintops

.               Peeking Meerkats

.               Marching Windswept Waves

.               The Biggest, Saltiest Raindroplet Ever

.               Heaven's Tear

 

.               Pinhole from the Clouds

.               Hissing Splash & Sputter

.               Fizz & Foam

.               Whirring Whisps

.               Liferipple & Mist

 

.               Seavalley Hike

.               Ceiling of the Deep

.               Chest of the Sea

.               Mother (of All)          

-Matthew Mettias                                            

From Safe Harbor in Palmyra

After 1400 nm of sailing south from Hawaii at an average speed of approximately 6.5 knots- in seas that ranged between Beaufort 4 and 7 for most of the trip we are finally here at the Marine Protected Area known as Palmyra Atoll. Our Transect oceanography work is now complete with 6 project teams collecting oceanographic data daily that ranged from measuring pH, Chlorophyll, collecting and sequencing eDNA samples, to measuring the relationship of the depth of the oxygen minimum and deep scattering layer- to measuring the biomass captured in our meter net tows.

The squalls of the inter-tropical convergence parted ways today and full sunshine greeted us as the ship entered the Palmyra channel with emerald colored waters that have a gorgeous blue color when the sun hits the shallows- ocean is contrasted by the deep greens of the vegetation  of this tropical paradise.   Hundreds of Masked Boobys flew in to greet  us and alighted on our rigging as we motored through the narrow channel with mantas swimming beneath us. Students looked in awe as we entered the west Lagoon and with a local escort we set our anchor for the first portion of our stay.

Once secured, a briefing by our TNC and FWS hosts took place, and then  two sets of Stanford teams set off in the ship's zodiacs to explore the reef to conduct the first set of coral reef fish transects on the terrace near Penguin spit. The objective today was to begin re-examining the status of the reef as discerned by our Stanford@SEA 2003 class, a project led  by former student Charlotte Stevenson. This year a team with Courtney and Lilah McKormick along with additional students Anna, Regina and Jess are surveying the same areas to see how they have changed.

In addition Postdoctoral associate Camille Pagniello and her acoustic team are "listening to the reef the next few days" to measure the fish sounds- a distinct way to assess the reef health. Finally our Manta Team has begun their oceanographic survey late this afternoon -  sampling the Manta habitats using the 2.1 million acoustic detections and satellite tagging data we have collected with our Colleagues previously as a guide on where to go. 

Remaining students are enjoying some well needed R & R at the Palmyra Swimming hole, and having guided tours of the bird habitats and landscape that makes this unique refuge a delightful place to visit.

From Palmyra,

Barbara Block

Prothro Professor of Marine Science

Infinity at Palmyra Atoll

I have dreamed of going to Palmyra since I was sixteen. Over the past half decade I have envisioned ten thousand versions of the moment I'd one day see it. None of the those imagined futures, not even the sum of all them, could approach the magic of real thing.

The ship was predicted to spot land sometime early this morning. I awoke at sunrise, slammed contact lenses into my eyeballs, and blitzed above deck.

The sky was wispy-grey, with rippling sheets of high-altitude clouds giving way to clear morning sky. On the far horizon, underlit cumulous clouds radiated pale yellow like the floor of Olympus. A thin gold line pierced through just above the horizon-the sun was edging upwards. Minute by minute, light rays grew and spilled over the horizon and refracted on the bottom of the clouds, which glowed orange, pink, and red. The full moon stood watch above the multicolor drama. 

There was Palmyra. Sixteen islets of silhouetted palms rising straight up from the ocean. Some parts of the forest appeared from this distance to be dense masses of jagged treetops, while others were thinner, and the outlines of individual trees emerged.

A Watch (we work in A, B, and C Watch group teams; I am in C Watch) was laughing happily as more folks came above deck and gazed baffled at the land. We all smiled silently as we leaned over the railing, each letting the realness of this moment filter through our own many imagined fantasies of it. Of all the different emotions we were each feeling individually, a core part of this experience carried the same inexplicable gravity for all of us.

*Aside: They had first spotted land that morning around 5:30 am (Erika shouted the definitive "Land Ho!"). About half an hour before that, A Watch had seen something in the sky. Erika saw it from the bow, and within seconds Vuk had rushed over and reported seeing the same thing: a pencil-thin line of brilliant white light, the length of the moon's diameter, streaking across the sky. And it didn't fade out-it soared on and on and remained in the sky for full seconds. A Watch religiously maintains that that they saw a UFO.* 

The water was purple. Then the sun peaked up and splashed it orange. Within a minute, the sky gave way to brilliant day.

*20 minutes later*

I'm sitting on the doghouse now. There is no wind so we've revved up the engine to motor towards Palmyra, aiming to anchor at 0900 in the lagoon. 

Now we're close enough to see color and depth on the island. What were once solid grey outlines now reveal themselves as three dimensional: there are forwardmost trees and trees receding into the distance forming a cove around a lagoon. Waves are breaking on the reef and throwing spray into the air.

We're under a mostly blue sky with a couple cloud puffs but a cluster of heavy grey clouds are gathered over Palmyra. A grey cube of opaque rain sheets down over the rightmost corner of the atoll. 

All morning, I had thought that the island seemed indifferent, stalwart-neither inviting nor shunning our approach. But now, as the dark rain mass crawls across the whole island and masks the emergent greens, blues, and whites back in grey, I sense the first note of foreboding. The ominous dread consistently documented in the sailing logs and journal entries of Palmyra-visiting mariners going two-and-a-half centuries back. (I and everyone else journaling about today aboard the RCS joins that anthology).

*5 minutes later*

Suddenly we're close. Students are asked to stay on the forward deck as the crew commandeers this tight, difficult channel entry. A couple crew with walkie-talkies have climbed up forty feet to the top of the rigging, another is standing on the bow, and Captain Greg stands with commanding confidence on the quarterdeck near the helm, and Duncan steers. As we enter the reef channel, crew members mandate that we all be quiet so commands can be received and updates given between the RCS and the small dingy manned by Palmyra staff, guiding us in.

No one would be speaking anyway. Language has melted away at the feet of the temple we were entering. Towering jungle trees of shimmering lime and deep dark green and every tone in between shoot up from the thinnest band of visible soil, ringed by a couple meters of powder-white sand, lapped by kissing baby waves. Above a single treetop circle five dozen boobies, moving like a feeding cyclone over an abundant feast. In another single branched tree, forty birds sit like porcelain Christmas lights. And that is every tree on this dozen-acre-long-patch of outcropping paradise. And the then the next islet is upon us: some different but equally spectacular wrangle of knotted up, squawking forest-vibrantly, aggressively, defiantly alive.

We scan all around us. All of a sudden we are inside it, in the lagoon. We are surrounded on all visible sides by these islets that formed millions of years ago when a colossal ocean volcano subsided on a moving tectonic plate down below the ocean surface and the coral reef growing around its rim crept upwards a couple centimeters per year, just faster than the volcano sank or the Pacific rose, and on the reef accumulated soil and sand, and trees grew and shark swarmed and birds nested and Polynesian voyagers stopped by during long voyages to catch fish and rest and then pass on, and still not a single human soul stayed and lived in this mystical place until just the last century.

Some of the islets are just a single, isolated, tall, 100-meter-across mottled mass of overgrown trees. Others are just five lone trees on a little spit of sand in the middle of the lagoon. We float past each in near silence. A deep, powerful rumble resonates from the edge of the reef, where the Pacific crashes on the coral. The main ambient soundtrack is, of course, the bird cries. Above that is the occasional click of some metal pulley in the rigging, tapping the mast. Above that are the sporadic directions Captain Greg is receiving through his radio and the updates he voices back.

Then, at a hushed murmur amidst that all, are our awed whispers. Regina just described the silence as "reverent." I am thinking of a quote from an essay I once read: "Language itself seems to fall to pieces when it touches certain topics."

The water below us is blindingly blue and pierced with sun rays. Farther on, surrounding the islets, the water is a pristinely mint-green, iridescent snow-blue, and can't be deeper than a couple feet. The magic of the moment is coupled by the gravity of the danger. Leaning over the railing, we can see clear-blue down to the reef floor below. Our slow, tactical entry over depths as shallow as twenty-five feet has incredibly high stakes.

"Mantas on the port side!" We all scramble to the railing. Two meters from the side of the boat, four manta rays swim at the surface. Each is about a meter across. They twirl and spin over for us. Their wings playfully flap the water before they retreat below. Then the water is calm for a minute, and then a blacktip reef shark passes by.

***

Within minutes, we had just seen all this. And we had merely just glided in without yet even trying to explore the layers of wonders alive and dead and undead in this place. Just then it collectively dawned on us-like a radiantly sun-lit cumulous cloud drifting overhead during sunrise-that we had entered an infinity. Unexplored and unexplorable depths of beauty and diversity thrive here.

That realization was augmented by another: we had never really "entered" an infinity because we had never left infinity. All the world is endlessly magnificent in ways that every living, conscious, and curious creature can spend their lives trying to understand. No matter if we try to master some portion of the night sky, a transect of the sea, a single islet, or a small patch of soil, we will never explore to the ends of all its dimensions. The world in its infinite complexity spans out farther and macroscopically bigger-but also more inward and microscopically smaller!-than any of its inhabitants can ever hope to comprehend.

Then, a third realization came: the endless beauty drifting past us before our eyes, and the endless beauty of the whole planet that hosts it, is the same infinity that we carry in each of ourselves.

Staring at the sun's glistening reflection in the water, picking up and letting go and picking up and letting go each of these infinities, I accepted that I could hold them all at once. And I was blissfully content with that.

- Charlie Hoffs