Kitchen Epiphanies

I spend a lot of time in the kitchen these days and it was there I discovered an exception to my general rule that everything tastes better when made from scratch.

Food better when homemade:


pizza, carrot cake, banana bread, ice cream, any type of pie, waffles, salads, quiche, french fries, stir-fry, and basically everything I cook/bake ever


Why? Taste, quality of ingredients, saves money, ratios, etc...

Food not better when homemade: 


polenta


Why? It takes like a year and a day to make (ok, I may be exaggerating a bit) and it tastes exactly the same as the pre-cooked blocks you find in the stores.  Plus, most of the flavor you enjoy from eating the polenta is from the sauce you douse it in (which of course tastes better when you make it yourself; I'd recommend yellow squash, eggplant, sauteed onions, peppers, tomatoes, spices and an assortment of grated cheese).


Conclusion to this post: unless you like grits, just buy the pre-cooked polenta.

You have to stir constantly for way longer than it's worth

Penguins again

On top of the many, many pictures I took of the penguins, I also took a couple of videos.  I was so close to them!  I wanted to just scoop one up and take it home.

And here's a link to another video I took: http://youtu.be/HqUgFLgoGeM

Pilot Whales!

Halfway!

It seems crazy that I've already been out at sea for three and a half weeks! Time is really flying by, probably because I'm always busy and getting lots of sleep. Apart from nights with lots of stern slaps (i.e. when a big wave hits the back of the ship and shakes it up and down), I sleep a good 8 or 9 hours a night. Though we're getting into rougher weather as we near the roaring 40s, and already some people have been feeling sea sick with the increased roll, pitch, and heave of the ship with the wind and waves. Luckily, I haven't gotten sea sick at all. I did get sick, which was strange since it was over a week in and no one else on board was sick, but luckily I was able to sleep for 24 hours and get back to work the following day.

Every day is more or less the same: dredging, surveying, data processing, or dealing with the rocks. Sawing rocks is getting interesting- you really have to saw with the motion of the ship. Another thing interesting to do with the rocking of the ship is working out. I do some yoga and stretching before I go to bed and the whole balancing aspect of yoga can be a challenge. Also, when doing crunches or push ups, half of the time they're really easy and the other half it feels like gravity just increased a lot.

I'm still enjoying almost everything about being at sea. Everyone seems to be getting along great. And I will never get tired of watching the ocean. Depending on the weather, the ocean is a different blue everyday. I have yet to see a whale or dolphin, but there are lots of seabirds around. I'll end with a picture of the sun setting over the ocean.

Life at Sea

Life is pretty routine now that we're over a week in. We travel from seamount to seamount, survey and name them, and then dredge promising looking places. Every dredge has come up differently so far: we've lost one, gotten one tangled, got pelagic ooze, only sediments, only manganese nodules, pillow basalts, or some combination of those and other rocks. We've also pulled up some corals and even a starfish. I believe we've dredged 13 times now. We have been naming the seamounts after characters in Moby-Dick or other whale-inspired names since Walvis means whale in Dutch (we're studying the Walvis Ridge if I haven't mentioned that).

If you click on one of the links in my last post before I left, you can see some deck cameras, and the one of the rear hanger with the A-frame is where we deploy and pull up the dredge. The dredging itself is not too exciting, we sit and watch the tension of the wire, bottom depth, how much wire is out and other data (on screens inside) as we travel over the dredge tract and then pull up the dredge and hope there are some good rocks. For a couple of dredges I was allowed to control the winch, which was kind of cool, though not really as exciting as it sounds.

One of my favorite jobs so far is throwing the rejected rock samples overboard. That may sound silly, but it allows me to get outside and just throw rocks into the gorgeous water. Another favorite on the ship is in the food department: the Elvis Cake one of the cooks made yesterday. It's basically banana cake with chocolate chips and peanut butter frosting. It was amazing, but also means that all of the bananas have basically gone bad. But that's ok because we still have other fresh fruit which I will continue to eat copious amounts of since by the end of the cruise, the food will not be based so much off of fresh produce.

I know this is kind of a random post, but I thought I'd email something in to document what's going on out here in the south Atlantic (I can't actually access my blog out here- I basically can only access email).

Dredging!

We got to our first seamount yesterday! This means we first surveyed it and then deployed a dredge. The first dredge seemed to be going well until the end when it got stuck on something (presumably rocks) and after a long time trying to free it, the chain broke and we lost the dredge. The second dredge wasn't much more successful: we came up with a dredge, but only a few sad little rocks. The seamount (more technically, a guyot) we called Ishmael, and it looks like we may be naming our seamounts after Moby-Dick characters.

Otherwise, this is basically what my life has been looking like during the day:

Penguins and Me!

I'm on a boat!

As you read this, I am somewhere in the South Atlantic Ocean heading west. We departed Cape Town on Saturday at 16:00. The students in the science party (of which I am a part of) are divided into 3 eight hour watches. I'm on the 09:00-17:00 (so think 9-5), which is awesome. So far all we've had to do is watch screens and log data, but once we reach Walvis Ridge we'll get to dredge rocks and they'll be lots to do!
Other things of note:
I have my own room and own bathroom/shower (most people have to at least share a bathroom).
There is a hot tub. Today I sat in a hot tub overlooking a deep blue ocean. It was amazing.
I won a game of hearts today.
The food is great, though I have a feeling the fresh fruit won't last too long.
I sleep really well with the rocking of the boat.
It's still kind of mind boggling to me that I'm actually on a big ship in the ocean of the coast of Africa, no less.