Friday The 13th

After a rough night with minimal sleep I got up for breakfast at 7h30.  I'm not sure who decided these meal times, but we have breakfast at 7h30, lunch at 11h30 and supper at 17h30.  Just because its always day doesn't mean we have to eat at these ridiculous, children's meal hours.  Or hospital times, as Dad puts it.  Anyway, with my shift running from 15h00 to 03h00 I won't be having breakfast for the next two weeks.  Lunch will become my breakfast, and supper my lunch.  I guess I'll have to scavenge around the kitchen for supper.  

Cabin Porthole View

After breakfast we had a planning session for the cruise and were allocated shifts etc. Then one of the crew came and guided us through various nightmare scenarios that could occur on board and we were shown what to do and where to gather in these various emergencies.  I hope I don't have to do any of those things. It was particularly worrisome when he said he won't even bother telling us about the normal life-jackets, because if we ended up in the water without dry suits we probably wouldn't last very long anyway.  


The ship was still rocking but fortunately it turns out that I don't get sea sick easily, although the one scientist from Ireland is man down.  He can be seen in the photo below laughing.  He wasn't laughing any more on Friday morning. Anyway, the joke was on me because the two of us alternate our shifts and I had to cover for him.  So at 11h00 I settled in for a long shift. The work isn't particularly challenging or difficult, but it does become draining after a while nonetheless.  More on what I actually do later in the week.

Scientists

Around midnight, towards the end of a dragged out 16 hour shift, after two nights with a combined total of 8 hours sleep, while the sun bounced off the horizon, I decided it was time to go fishing.  The biologists were bored, the crew was twiddling their thumbs, and the day in general had lacked action.  So I said "Let's do it".  With the cruise leader asleep, various crew members I was yet to meet were asking me "when?", "where?", "how deep?", "how long?".  I gave them the numbers and it took a team of about six crew, monitored by the various ships' mates and the captain (who had woken up especially for it), to get the massive trawl gear into the water. It took around 30min to get it in and get started and then we trawled that water with a net 30m wide for over an hour.  Again it took over half an hour to get the net back on board as the freezing wind whipped all around. Finally, 2 hours later, all that work yielded about as much fish and crustaceans as I could have caught in the same time as a ten year old boy fishing in the rockpools at Oyster Bay with a cheap kids net.

Pulling In An Empty Net

The Arctic Ocean 1, Dave 0.  But I was too tired to care. I went to bed and slept for twelve hours.

End Of A Long Day