Call gets her sea legs (21.20, -159.18)

Ok folks, this is not a drill. This is the real thing. Call is at sea.

Once we were out of the Honolulu port, our first order of business was the safety drills. The ship has "man-overboard" drills, fire drills, abandon ship drills and pirate drills. Luckily for us, the scientist have one job for all emergency situations. All we have to do is grab our life vests out of our rooms (first you have to find your room again) and go to the staging platform at the stern of the 00 deck (i.e., the open space on the bottom deck at the back of the ship). My biggest challenge today has been learning the ship vocabulary. That and trying not to get sea sick. No major fails yet.

I am on my first watch right now. We work 4 hours on and 8 hours off. I have the 4-8 am and 4-8 pm shifts. We have to watch all of the instruments to make sure nothing goes wrong. This research mission costs about 40 thousand dollars a day, so if one of the instruments fails for any amount of time and it is not noticed, it becomes pretty costly. Plus they (our chief scientists) threatened to name the resulting gap in the data after whoever was on watch so any scientist who wants to use our data will curse our name when they have to deal with missing data. 

I am told we currently have "fair weather and a following sea" which are the two things sailors hope for. A following sea means the waves are propagating in the same direction that we are sailing. We don't have to fight the current and we are not sailing perpendicular to the waves which makes the boats pitch and roll are all over the place. Pitch is the front and back motion and roll is the side to side motion. The third dimension is heave, the up and down motion.

Sitting on the stern this afternoon, watching the horizon and Oahu get smaller and smaller behind us, I was reminded of our last night in Waikiki and the Hula Dancers we got to see. A couple of the performances were very traditional ancient hula dances (different from the modern, smooth, seductive, as seen in movies, hula). Watching those ladies hips and hands mimic waves and water made you certain that these were people of the sea. Their motions were so beautiful and strong. You could feel the meaning behind their movements as they danced prayers for prosperity and peaceful gods. Their dance was one of respect and fear of the untamed energy of the ocean. It was really beautiful.