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We’re still on Alaska Time, one hour behind Seattle, but this leg of our trip will end in Norway where the local time is ten hours ahead of us. There are two ways for a ship to manage this situation – a bad way and a good way. The bad way is to wait until you’re one day out of port and your logistics for that port are hopelessly bungled because the ship and the ship’s agent (the ship’s representative in the port) are not referencing the same time zone to plan your arrival, fueling, etc. The bad way also involves putting the ship through an enormous time shift in one jump; essentially you finish with breakfast, reset your watch, and immediately get in line for dinner. Rather than this, we have chosen the good way. Over the next six weeks HEALY will advance the clocks once or twice per week, in one-hour increments, to eventually wind up synchronized with Norway. This may affect the timing of e-mails you receive from your family and friends onboard, but other than that the effect will not be noticeable. Until your spouse calls you on the Iridium phone, at 2.a.m Seattle time, to chat. I have been neglectful in highlighting one group of crewmembers who made an enormous contribution to the success of our last science mission – our divers. This group includes LTJG Jessica Noel, ENS Keidi Neimann, MKCS Mike Huff, BM2 Philip Dawalt, and ENS Ariel Piedmont (who was ‘on loan’ for this mission from the POLAR SEA). As you can imagine, it’s cold up here. Still, their high-tech gear allowed them to dive at 12 stations to collect “comb jellies” (aka, ctenophores, non-stinging cousins of jellyfish). The divers used plastic jars to hold their prey, and the specimens were used onboard by the scientists metabolism experiments and gut content analysis. The surface-supplied divers were lowered to about 40ft, where they would look for the species we were collecting. Sometimes the comb jellies were very shallow in the water column, at other times they were deep. Depending on the their abundance and depth, the divers would collect as many as possible before returning to the surface. Dives lasted from 20 to 75 minutes each, usually between 30 and 60ft, though on a couple dives they reached 100 feet in depth. This week’s roster of significant professional accomplishments include:
Once again I’m writing this a day earlier than normal, because we are still hovering near the limit of our principal satellite communications system. Last week’s caution still applies: If we go ‘out of touch’ for a few days while the techs work out the bugs in the system that will see us through to the Pole, don’t fret. We’re all fine, and comms will resume in short order. For Captain Dan Oliver, Command Master Chief Pete Perron and myself, thanks for all your support. You’ll hear from us again next week. No pictures this week as explained above. |
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The Coast Guard Cutter Healy, homeported in Seattle, Washington.
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