Kayaking!

While my first NOAA blog about the ship is awaiting approval, here's two photos from kayaking in Captains Bay in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, before we headed out to see. The girl is one of the NOAA Corps ensigns (Chelsea), the guy in the top photo (Kevin) is a new ensign fresh out of BOT-C (basic officer training class for NOAA corps), and the guy in the bottom photo is one of the deck crew (Brian).

Yesterday (July 1), we didn't do any fishing because there were no fish to be caught. I spent most of my shift interviewing people on board for one of my last blog posts on everybody that I'm working with. They are all super interesting people that have gotten to be here from every which way possible. Every time I talk with someone, I realize how much they know and how little I know about the fisheries industry. And let's just say, I haven't found a single one of them that's a fan of the Deadliest Catch haha!

Oh, and have I gotten my sea legs yet? I thought so until this morning. The water has been really calm the past two days, and they started doing an experiment last night (while I was sleeping) with an open net, but not trying to catch any fish, to play with weights and determine the best way to use a bottom trawl net for midwater fishing (using a different net to catch fish in the middle of the ocean water column versus at the bottom). So there's a lot more rockin' and a rollin' than there has been the past few days. This combined with the fact that I'm scared to eat breakfast at 4am is making my stomach a littttle queasy, but not enough to take that Dramamine I took the first day that totally messed with my system. Plus, the chief steward on board (aka the chef) makes such delicious food, but I'm also not used to eating the burgers, fries, fried chicken, pizza, etc. that he's fixing, so I've been trying to slowly add that food into my meals.

We are headed up farther north now on our transect line (we will go north for so far, over west a little, back down south, over west a little more, back up north, over west a little, etc ...), so the waters are getting colder (it was 6 degrees yesterday on the surface), which means we probably won't fish for pollock until tomorrow. You can sorta see what transect lines look like below (this is from NOAA's shiptracker website where it shows where the ship is at any given time). But there's plenty of other things going on on the ship for me to tell you about at a later time :)

Until then ...