Living conditions

A friend emailed and asked me to describe the living conditions here on the Bigelow.

Two people are assigned to a stateroom that has a desk (with a computer and phone), two lockers, bunk beds with drawers underneath, a sink, and a bathroom with a toilet and shower. The rooms vary in size: some are narrower than others and some have a porthole or window. The bunks have curtains that can be drawn around them. This is necessary because people may not be on the same watch and one person may need to sleep while the other must be awake.

I sleep on the top bunk and it is very comfortable. I wish I had these curtains when I was a kid and slept in a bunk bed. The curtains make it very cozy. Each bed also has a light so we are able to read in bed.

The scientists I am working with tell me that this is the most comfortable ship they have been on. On other ships there may be four people in a room and as many as six people must share a bathroom.

Our lifejackets and survival suits are also stored in our staterooms.

Linen is provided by the ship. There is a laundry room that we can use for our personal clothing.

The food is great. There are several choices for each meal and snacks are always available. For dinner tonight there were stuffed lobster tails, Cornish game hens, and trout nuggets.

Each stateroom has a satellite receiver and the computer monitor serves as a flat screen TV. There are also 42" flat screen televisions in the scientists' lounge and on the mess deck. Movies can be received from a centrally located VCR or DVD.

It's not quite a cruise ship, but on the other hand we are hardly roughing it.

Acoustics and Plankton

Today at 5:45 AM I watched as the hydrophone array was deployed off the stern of the boat. The instrument contains four different hydrophones that are designed to record sounds of different frequencies. Sounds are recorded during the time that we do the visual observations and then the recorded sounds will be matched with the observations. The observers saw some sperm whales today and I was able to hear them as they went past the ship.

I also helped collect plankton today at noon and again at 6PM. The two large nets are called bongos and they are pulled behind the boat. The nets have different sized mesh and collect different types of plankton. I will be bringing samples back to Winnacunnet for my students to observe.

After the 6PM plankton tow, the Video Plankton Recorder was launched. This large, yellow instrument that looks like a glider is pulled at a depth of 2000 meters and the plankton is photographed. I will also be able to bring some of these pictures back to school.

I know the pictures are small, just click on them and they'll get bigger.

We're in the Gulf Stream

This was the view at 5:50 this morning. It was a very pleasant and warm day until about 3:30 when it started to rain. We spent most of the day in the Gulf Stream and saw lots of sperm whales and dolphins.

We also saw several balloons, including at least five groups of balloons. The Bigelow altered its course to inspect a large group of orange and white balloons that were floating on the ocean surface. Because the balloons were similar in color to life rafts, the Bigelow was obligated to check them out. Balloons are a real menace to marine animals. Turtles mistake balloons for jellyfish and when they ingest them they may die. The strings on balloons frequently entangle birds, fish, and mammals. Balloons take a very long to degrade and releasing helium balloons is illegal in many areas.

Waterspouts

Today the observers saw sperm whales and several types of dolphins. I only saw one dolphin and I was not able to identify it. It was a very hot day standing behind the Big Eyes and scanning the ocean surface for animal life. We went off the continental shelf and it is now more than two miles deep. At the end of the day we noticed that there were more birds and Sargassum weed so we know that we are getting close to the Gulf Stream.

As we were returning to our observation positions after lunch, we saw several waterspouts on the horizon. A waterspout is a funnel shaped cloud that occurs over a body of water and brings the water upward to the cloud. They are weaker than land tornadoes. If you click on the picture (or any of the pictures for that matter) it will enlarge.

I saw a sperm whale!

Today was a windy, sunny day. We saw a lot of dolphins: Atlantic white sided, common, striped, and bottlenosed. We also saw pilot whales and sperm whales.

The highlight of the day came for me at 2:25. I was on the port Big Eye and I saw a blow about two miles away. I called out the required information that I could at that time: distance, bearing, behavior, and number. I thought it must be a sperm whale and hoped that I would be able to see it. It blew again and its head came out of the water. The head was large and rounded and I thought it was a sperm whale. The other observers asked me all the appropriate questions to help me decide if it was indeed a sperm whale. I said it was and it was recorded. A short time later the scientists who were recording the whale sounds said that they had recorded a sperm whale in the location of my sighting.

Here's a way to follow the ship

Go to "shiptracker.NOAA.gov" and you can see the ship's location and where it has been on this cruise.

I saw some marine mammals!

I went to the top deck at 5:45 AM and helped set up the Big Eyes and the computer. It took awhile for everything to get ready and we finally started to look for whales and dolphins. A watch lasts for 90 minutes and the observer spends 30 minutes on each Big Eye and 30 minutes on the computer. There are five members on an observing team. At the beginning of the day three team members are assigned to the three positions: port Big Eye, computer, and starboard Big Eye. Every 30 minutes the observers rotate a position to the right, so if you started at the port Big Eye (like I did) then you would rotate to the computer and 30 minutes later rotate to the starboard Big Eye. When you finish with the starboard Big Eye, you rotate out for 60 minutes and then return an hour later at the port Big Eye.

My first watch was shortened because we were setting up, but on the second watch I saw a Risso's dolphin. Right near the end of my watch I saw a whale breach and then the big splash.
Other people saw the splash, so they're pretty sure it was too big to be a tunafish. They think it might have been a sperm whale, so maybe I saw a sperm whale.

It rained a lot today. It seems like all we did was cover and uncover the Big Eyes. From 4:30-5:00 I saw what I thought were dolphins but they turned out to be a small inflatable raft-yellow on one side and black on the other. The black side when it was rolling in the wind, almost four miles away, looked very dolphin-like so I'm calling it a "lifeboat dolphin". The Bigelow had to pick up the lifeboat and check it out to make sure there wasn't a name on it from a ship. It didn't look like a regulation lifeboat, it was more like a child's toy boat. So that's what the picture is: my lifeboat dolphin.