Land Ho!

The many days we've spent on the open ocean are coming to a temporary halt. We are nearing land (!) as indicated by the change of currents, birds, and smells we've encountered today. Who knew you could smell land before you can see it? I definitely didn't, and have yet to confirm if I've been gifted with this special sailor sense. If I am, this will certainly not be the first time I've experienced something entirely new in our time at sea. While at first unfamiliar, I'm now calmed by the unrelenting motion in our groundings, hum of fans, and whisper of wind that make the ship feel like a home. I've been looking forward to reaching Palmyra since the day we left the harbor, but as we approach our first land destination I've felt nostalgically reflective of our days spent surrounded by nothing but the boundless sea.

The ocean has been a moody host. Some days, she greets us with a gentle current that lulls us into a hazy sleep down below deck. These nights leave the Seamans without a trace, disappearing in the wind we've learned to harness. Other times, the comfort we find in the ocean's soothing rhythms is abruptly disrupted by her seething hisses and the wind's bottomless howls. These nights tend to linger, found in a sleepy smile shared by my watch mates in the lab or an all-too-frequent missing number in our role call. 

The sea's omnipresence has dictated all we've done, observed, and felt in the past two weeks. As I bob twenty feet in the air on the bow under the moonlight, the extent of our powerlessness begins to set in. The thought scares me: are we as in control as our meticulous boat checks, regimented schedules, and precise sail handlings have made me feel? I distract myself by picking my favorite stars from the sky, mindlessly latching on to a handful of speckles from above. Approaching land brings some eagerly awaited comfortability - our microcosm has known nothing but the unfamiliar since the day we departed.

Soon, we will be greeted by the welcoming sight of trees, dirt, bugs, and everything else I've vowed to no longer take for granted. I anticipate my relationship with this ship will change when we reach land - the leathery charthouse maps, sticky handrails (it turns out no amount of Envirox will ever be enough), and resilient sails will no longer be our lifelines. But for now, this is our world. And until the smell of land reaches my eager nose, I will relish in what surprises the ocean decides to bring us next.

-Mia Bennett

Marina

Dear,
Home is nearer than you may know:
                Because your spirit is here
                And I will always stay -

Eyes sailing the coastline sided by familiar faces (of) New sisters and brethren both
                And the peeking sun
                                                And the windswept wave.

This boat, however heavy-ladened
Will carry us safely to shorelines-
So surely peace, you have not yet deserted me.

Joy, you can still be found.
Hope, please hold on here once more.

For not all nights are starstreaked
(And) Not always will the gentle wind whistle lullabies: 

(See) Sometimes she laments,

(Sea) Sometimes these sails scream.

And marching waves bellow in agony for their sunken losses.

--

And still yet, their arrival-

Aboard this liquid land ceiling of violence and vibrancy alike- Serves as a constant; A reminder that we are not alone.

Though not always together

Marina, my love, home still nears.

-Matt Mathias

A Quick Note From the Editor...

Hi there!

My name is Randy Kochevar and I'm in daily communication with the ship, posting blogs and sharing news, etc.

I just received a trove of photos that were supposed to accompany the blogs the students have written. I've just added them (hopefully in the right places!), so you might want to take a second look if you were hoping to see a photo or two of your smiling child/boyfriend/girlfriend/student/whatever.

Best wishes!

Randy

The People With Me Everyday

When we each had the brief chance to add a Mother's Day note to the blog a couple days ago, I was in the middle of dish duty and helping wrap up a short-handed galley clean-up, then was immediately pulled above deck to help set the jib. I missed the opportunity to wish you a Happy Mothers Day on the exact day, but your omnipresence in my life transcends time, distance, and holidays. Mom, Ooma, Tete, Gigi: I feel you here with me everyday. 

Mom, I feel you here with me in every moment when I am challenged to push beyond my fears. On the second day of sailing, when a momentary reprieve from seasickness allowed me to jump back in on watch duties, I was put at the helm. Steering through 16 foot swells in the Molokai Channel, the boat keeling over so much that the starboard side almost sloshed underwater and waves sprayed over port deck, I was terrified. Then I thought about you thinking about me, relying on me being brave. You have always given me the confidence to steer my boat through rough seas. And I managed to stay on at the helm all the way through. After a few days, it is now my favorite watch duty.

Ooma, I feel you here with me at every opportunity I have to enjoy spending time with my shipmates. You have taught me so much about friendship, in the ways you center your life around people. Whenever I tell you about my anxieties with school/work/the future and seek advice, you always coolly remind me that everything is about people. Thinking about you thinking about me here on the boat, I want to make you proud by putting friendships first:

laughing, singing, cooking, eating, playing all together.

Tete, I feel you here during every moment in which I take an extra pause, and intentionally relish it. It brings me immeasurable joy to witness the joy you find in every day, from spectacular cross-country adventures to America's most beautiful places, to the everyday but still wonder-filled Trader Joes runs and home-cooked meals (you're the only one I know who loves grocery shopping as much as I do), to each treasured moment with friends and family. Here, I try to remind myself that each moment is a priceless gift. 

Gigi, I feel you here with me at every moment in which I feel the thrill of adventure. Traversing the fjords to Antarctica, the Great Wall to the Inca Trail, you are the explorer I dream of becoming, and I try to walk in your footsteps each day. As I gaze out at the Southern Cross emerging at midnight just above the horizon, you are here.

Happy Mother's Day to the most important people in my life. I love you!

-Charlie Hoff

Oceanography

The sun is finally shining on our voyage and the Trade winds are blowing at18-20 knots making our sailing under the four lowers and occasional Jib Topsail spectacular and colors vibrant. Oceanographic science has taken off quickly aboard the Stanford@SEA voyage with 6 stations (am and pm) already processed and in the bank.  9 teams of student projects are occurring on this cruise and the first 3 teams- focusing on spectacular eddies created by the island mass effect around the Hawaiian Islands, a second team investigating why white sharks linger in offshore waters south of the archipelago have gone into full gear.  A third team is analyzing the water collected for eDNA- forensically identifying who and what swims in the waters from the tiny bits of cells they shed. Each night we run a "hydrocast" and collect samples  from the Nisken bottles that automatically sample 2L of water and our instrumentation attached to the hydrocast frame collects conductivity, pressure and temperature data- the physical oceanographic data that helps us read the waters beneath or ship.

This is followed by  a meter net tow  that is sent down to the deep scattering layer- a thick layer we can acoustically see as our ADCP profiler sends sound down that bounces off the air bladders of the critters swimming in these layers. We can scoop a little bit of the ocean up with our Meter Net which we carefully put out two times a day down to depth as deep as
400m-   for later analyses to complement the abiotic data we are taking.

Once the samples are on deck from the depths we measure pH, oxygen, nitrate, phosphate and complement this with eDNA sampling.  We have taken almost 8 hydrocasts and 6 net tows- we've run 6 eDNA stations trying to find clues as to what backboned fish and mammals utilize these waters- by isolating their dna as they swim by.  Sequencing has commenced and shortly here aboard the RCS we'll know who is below us to complement the visual IDs in the net.

Students are quickly learning their lines and doing all the sail handling with their mates leading the way- it's an exciting time aboard the ship as full operations have commenced and the sailing is easy!

Dr. Barbara Block

Stanford Professor &

Chief Scientist S303

Leaning Into Uncertainty

As I write this in the library, I watch the porthole windows fill every few seconds with a rush of coiling white water. The gimballed tables behind me, which remain still regardless of the tilt of the boat, move at 45-degree angles to the benches every few seconds. After dawn watch two days ago, I came up on deck into the post-sunrise silvery seas and saw Vuk, my watch officer, standing next to the helm beaming. "This is typical for the Pacific," he said, as a three-meter wave rolled the boat at a pitch that sent me stumbling for the rail. "We're offshore for real now!"

Finally-heading south to Palmyra.

The ocean these days looks like blue hill ranges stretching to the horizon, ridges upon shifting ridges of them mottling beneath the wind. I'm still getting used to it after we spent five or so days sailing around the Hawai'ian islands. Not that I got used to that: with the clouds coiled around the volcanoes, every time I looked out my window it still felt like I'd cut out a picture from a textbook on magma hotspots and the Pacific Ocean.

Just before we set off from the shores of Hawai'i, I called my mother for the last time, waking her up at some time past midnight in Singapore.

(Sorry, Mama. Happy late Mother's Day! The interrupted sleep was my gift.) I videoed her the sunrise. As she squinted at the screen, the outline of the bedroom where I spent ten years of my life became just visible behind her and it hit me that as weird as all of this is, the rest of the world doesn't feel real, either. As the texts and updates came in the last wave of notifications while our boat pulled away from cell service, the names and people felt like (dearly beloved and deeply missed) characters in a story I heard once upon a time.

It's difficult to imagine that in another world, I'd be helping with dinner clean in Kairos or having lunch with my friends in Branner Hall or biking down Alpine Road. Or back in Singapore, hugging my dog or sitting on the balcony drinking a coffee in the morning. I miss the deep familiarity of it all and the places and people I could find my way towards blindfolded. But I am trying, as well, to lean into this place and these people where I have-literally-no ground to fall back on except what we can see and hold right in front of us. In learning it I realize how long it's been since I've been in a place where I've had to start from scratch with everything.

Audrey, our TA, told us as we got on the boat that she likes to compare sailing to launching off into outer space. JP, the assistant engineer, reminded us a few days ago that even on the International Space Station, it would only take you an hour to return to civilization. Now, more than 400 nautical miles into our voyage, it will take us days.

Going through the pin rail, where all the ropes that control the sails attach, and memorizing where each coil went and what it did, as I try to decipher what a jig does or where an outhaul leads, repeating the names over and over, hoping against hope they'd stick and knowing they probably wouldn't, I feel so out of my depth. But it's the kind of deep dizziness that comes with when, in lab, I turn to the computer and see there's four kilometres of straight ocean below us. I have to keep shaking myself into the truth of it every few hours: I'm here, in the Pacific, sailing south on a tall ship with nothing but the wind. This is going to be my life for the next month.

I need to get used to the fact that there isn't really any finding your ground here. There's only leaning into the uncertainty of it. Anyone who knows me knows I hate uncertainty, but that's all there is: you don't know how large the next wave is going to be, you don't know what's going to set you stumbling, you don't know what's going to be on the horizon. You don't know what the meter net will pull up, you don't know what's going to be in the Niskin bottles when you twist them open and the cold water comes rushing out, from 400 meters down.

So instead I memorize the pin rails and I know where to go when someone tells me I need to haul on the halyard. Instead I learn to tense my knees and broaden my stance so a big swell won't knock me off. Instead I scan the horizon, I hope for a whale spout and in its place I get the black line of a shearwater tracing the tip of a wave. Instead we filter water and pipette DNA and make backup plans on backup plans and let them go and claim them again, one by one by one. And I find one kind of knowing always leaves room for another. Every question only points to a second just ahead. I stay for the sunset. I try to remember how it looks. I try to remember there'll never be another like it.

In The Overstory, the book I'm reading right now, there's a quote I wrote down in my notebook: "The only true things are humility and looking." These days that's all there is: I'm at the bow, I'm looking out. With every horizon I scan I'm reminded the whole world comes before my body. I am still growing into the shape of it.

The Solace of a Handrail

It has been about two days since we lost sight of land. On deck, we are greeted by undulating, prussian blue waves as far as the eye can see.

Sometimes the waves are frothy, threatening to break on top of us with every swell, pushing us around with reckless abandon. At other times, they gleam in the sunlight, playfully jostling our boat and waving hello through the galley portholes. Surprisingly, being removed from all signs of terrestrial life has been a lot less scary than I had imagined it would be. It is astonishing how quickly I have become accustomed to my new life on the Robert C. Seamans. I have become accustomed to my tiny bunk, packed close together with familiar faces and new ones, to being woken up at odd hours of the night to stand watch for the boat, to hunching over in the stuffy engine room, making sure all the machines are functioning as they should be. I am even getting accustomed, albeit slowly, to the constant motion that defines the life of a sailor.

In the past few days, I have stubbed my toes no less than ten times. I have learned that if you don't have one hand available at any given time, you have no chance of steadying yourself when the boat encounters a strong wave.

It has been amusing to discover how many things have been strategically placed around the boat to help people balance themselves. In the galley, we have poles and handrails and benches to grab onto (but if you ever make the grave mistake of grabbing onto the gimballed tables, yours or a fellow shipmate's lunch will be promptly launched into the air). In the bunk space, there are handrails on the ceiling that you can swing onto from an upper bunk to steadily descend onto the ground. In the engine room, amidst the hot metallic pipes and whirring machines, the solace offered by a wooden handrail in a moment of unstable despair is unparalleled.

Sleeping on a moving ship has also been an interesting experience. On days when the conditions are calm, I love being lulled to sleep by the gentle waves. But on some nights, it is impossible to avoid hitting every solid surface in my bunk, making restful sleep a little harder to come by.

Despite the turbulence of this rocky new world, I already know that when I'm back on land, I will miss it. For the first time in my life, I am surrounded by my favorite part of the earth, gravity is unreliable and relenting, the only people I can talk to are the ones I live with, and the work I do is not for my own benefit, but for the benefit of my ship and my wonderful shipmates.

To my family and friends, I miss you so much! I hope you all are doing so well. I already have many, many stories to share with all of you.

(Love you and miss you Baba, Amma, Sohi and Mowgli)

By Maitri Rangarajan Paul