Cruise & Australia trip day 03

Packing for a large research cruise takes a long time, unpacking can take even longer. To get there, we sent a standard shipping container (the 20-footers you see on cargo ships) loaded with equipment to San Diego ahead of us. Sure, it took a while to plan what goes in the container, not to mention loads of pre-visualization, measuring, and re-organization, Tetris-style to get it all to fit as efficiently and safely as possible.

When we arrived in San Diego, we take the rental van directly to the docks, to get to work on unloading the container, setting up the equipment, and storing the excess away. This isn't as easy as it sounds. It's not like coming home after a trip when you dump out a suitcase and put things back from whence it came. For the rest of my lab, this is a new ship, they've never been on it before and don't know the layout of the labs, storerooms, work areas, or bunk rooms. I was on this boat for six weeks in 2003 out of Honolulu (going more than halfway to Japan and back in the first three weeks, then circumnavigating the Hawaiian islands for the remaining three weeks), so I'm very familiar with it.

However, there are four other university-level institutions along for the ride. So that's another couple of containers full of equipment to pull out onto the docks, which then gets carried by hand or craned onto the ship. It takes thirty people working 14 hour days for three days to get everything onboard.

Here's the ship, the R/V Roger Revelle. You may recognize the name as the scientist name-checked by Al Gore in "An Inconvenient Truth." And the "R/V" has a slash because it stands for "Research Vessel," while "RV" stands for "Recreational Vehicle." I doubt you will find a scientist or R/V crew member who would call it anything close to recreational.


Well, I can setup my station rather quickly (under 20 minutes). I know what I'm doing and how to do it. So after this, I go back out to help the community effort of unloading, craning with canvas nets (only crew can operate the cranes), and being basic pack animals.

An idea that can go either way

This place is empty. It's a Picasa blog, so the idea is to share pictures. If you read my other blog (and please do), you should get the idea that I take loads of digital pictures. I have many of them on various photo-sharing websites, but when you deal with quantity, the quality suffers. So here, I thought I would post a single picture at a time, with some accompanying text to describe the photo. Otherwise, you get no context, as I don't feel like renaming and captioning thousands of photos.

One of the biggest trips of my young life so far has been a combination month-long research cruise across the Pacific Ocean, beginning in San Diego and ending in Tahiti, and afterwards heading into Australia for almost three weeks. I talk about it so much because it's the only cool thing I have done. I figured I'd select one photo from each day to share. This can work well when on the boat, as routine events take place, leaving less chance for interesting shots as the days pass. It will be tougher later on when I was taking hundreds of photos a day in Australia, so I may share more than one, or maybe many days sharing one photo at a time from a single day of the trip. There is no set structure. If you check out my other photos, you can make a special request for a description, and I hope I can eventually get around to it. For this trip in photos, I plan to share chronologically.

Here is the second photo I took on this trip, after landing in San Diego (Southwest from Oakland, CA). Day one was November 29, 2004, the first Monday after Thanksgiving. As is typical in American commercialism, the day after one holiday ends, everything turns to the next holiday.

I also wrote a daily travelogue of this trip, I think after it's all added up, it is over 400 pages single spaced. I've been looking into online publication services to turn it into book form.