deep sea fishing

Just got back from another 2-day work cruise. The novelty is starting to wear off a bit, now that I've been on 3 of them in the past 2 months, but something new and different seems to happen on each one.

This time it was deep sea fishing.

On any normal cruise, there's always some small amount of fishing going on. At least a few members of the crew are out there with their fishing rods, working around the science to do their darndest to catch us some nice meals. On my institute's boat, this is mainly the ship's engineer, but the rest of them get into it too. They almost always have lines running when the boat is moving to try and catch fast swimmers, such as dolphinfish (mahi), mackerel, kingfish, etc.

This time we had one scientist on board who's job it was to go deep-sea fishing. (What a job, huh.) That is, she was supposed to collect 200 juvenile black sea bass. This is a fish that hangs out on the bottom, hiding under stuff, and are mainly found in reef areas. This means that you can't just get them en masse with some kind of net. The most common means of catching them, as far as I'm aware, is to set out traps (wire boxes with bait; fish swims in to eat the bait and can't get back out. Works for crabs, lobsters, and various and sundry other things as well).

So we had a number of fishing stops, where the moment the boat stopped, practically everyone on board was hanging a line over the side. There were plenty of fishing rods available and the chief engineer quickly taught me how exactly they work and what to do. I was fishing with the best of them and was soon screwing up in every major way possible. :)

The funniest story out of the whole thing, though, wasn't mine. It was when the engineer lost his rod. I was fishing along next to him (trying to get the reel to behave, mostly) when suddenly I heard a loud splash. I looked over, and he was standing there with a "doh!" type of grin on his face. His rod was completely missing. Evidently something had yanked so hard on the line that it had taken the entire thing overboard. (general note: when things fall overboard and it's not a hugely expensive piece of scientific equipment that you want to get back, it's gone for good. Getting stuff back usually requires divers.)

A few minutes later, the chief scientist (who was standing on the other side of the engineer) noticed that there seemed to be a lot of dead weight on his line. He reeled up ... sure enough, the engineer's rod was at the other end.

Anyway, we didn't catch very many black sea bass. Final count: 6. (I caught the last one of those just as we were wrapping up for the night :) ). Clearly the hook and line method isn't going to net 200 fish in a 2-day trip.

We caught a large number of other fish, too. The smallest of those got used as live bait by a couple of people out to cath us dinner, and they managed to get a couple of really nice-sized red snappers. Real red snappers, as in the kind from the Gulf. Not a fish that is red that is sold in markets as "red snapper." (This is especially confusing on the east coast, because there is another snapper called the vermilion snapper, which is also red, and is therefore marketed as "red snapper" because it IS red, and it IS a snapper... but it doesn't taste anywhere near as good.) The chief scientist hazarded a guess that those fish were probably worth $70 each. We happily ate them for lunch the next day. :)

So that's where I've been these past couple of days. That, combined with the usual sampling type things I'm normally helping with, made for a very exhausting cruise with very little sleep (most of it was limited to 20 minute naps in between the stations, which were around 40 minutes to an hour apart). I didn't even slightly have the worst of it, though. The guy who was processing all the water samples had to work nonstop for 10 hours. As in, on his feet in the wet lab the whole entire time. We kept getting to the next station before he was done with the last one. And he wouldn't let anyone help, because it wasn't set up in a way that anyone else really could. Needless to say, this cut down on whining from the rest of us. ;)

And like I mentioned last time I talked about cruises ... the mentality of doing the work is very reversed on a boat. Everybody wants to do lots of work. Midway through the stations, the chief scientist told me to take over on someone else's job, and the other guy was quite put out by the whole idea. He did show me what to do, and then after that he kept complaining about feeling useless. I kind of felt guilty, too, but before that point I was feeling kind of useless, so umm. :p It made logical sense too; the other guy was a visiting scientist, and the idea was that in future cruises, I would need to know how to do that particular task, so, might as well get trained on it while there's someone around to supervise.

Final note on the cruise: I developed an addiction to pistachios. They have all kinds of snack foods on board, which means lots of munching goes on around the clock, and I settled on the pistachios. On the grocery run I just did an hour ago, I bought myself a huge bag of them. Nuts sure are fun. :)