Slowly but surely catching up

Got back from my work cruise yesterday afternoon. Lots of stuff seems to have happened in the past week on all of my sites, and I'm slowly getting around to reading everything. It's taking a while, though. There's sites I probably won't get around to visiting for a few more days.

The cruise was pretty good. :) Flat calm seas the whole way there and back. We went to the Sargasso Sea, which has the most beautiful clear blue water one could ever hope to lay eyes on. Makes you want to just jump right in for a swim. ;) We weren't allowed to do that, though - against the policies of the research vessel fleet. Apparently someone got bit by a shark during a swim call, so they put a stop to swim calls. :(

The fishing was excellent. The crew caught two blackfin tunas, a mahi, a wahoo, a bunch of mackerel ... and a yellowfin tuna that was over 4 feet long and over 100 lbs. (!) The chief engineer was ecstatic. :) (This would be the same guy in a past anecdote, who inadvertently lost his rod that then got reeled back up by someone else...). We have all sorts of pictures of him holding it up and posing.

Also, this'll probably gross a few of you out but I'll mention it anyway. Sushi straight from the fish. :D We ate bits of the yellowfin tuna while the chief engineer was filleting it. The muscles hadn't even stopped twitching all the way when he started that. It was as fresh as you can possibly get. :) Needed to be chilled to really taste good, though. We also had impromptu sushi the next day ... wrong kind of rice, wrong kind of soy sauce, and the wasabi was the kind in a plastic squeeze tube... but the fish was excellent. :)

A couple days after that we did a whole bunch of fishing at a fairly shallow spot. I caught nothing. :p The fish down there were really smart. They knew how to take bait off the hook without being caught. Basically all I did was feed them, because the moment my line hit the bottom it was gone. And I haven't quite got the hang of jerking it back up in time to hook anyone. Everyone else was catching nonstop small fish that were too small to keep (except as bait for bigger fish), and I caught not a darn thing. But at least I am getting the hang of not messing up the reel. When the line hits the bottom and it goes momentarily limp, you have to have your thumb on the spool to keep it from bouncing back and going "sproing!" and making a big mess out of the spool. Oh well. Slowly but surely I"ll figure out how to deep-sea fish. :)

Oh yes, and we also did science stuff on this cruise. Heheh. My main purpose was to get light profiles and filter for chlorophyll concentration. Also I took over running the CTD casts. That's the big package of instruments which measure a bunch of things (temperature, salinity, chlorophyll, dissolved organic matter, oxygen, light attenuation, etc.) and also includes a bunch of water sampling bottles. We send that thing overboard and down a couple hundred meters, get a general idea of what the water column is like, and collect water to filter for stuff (chlorophyll for me, nutrients and DNA and other things for the other scientists on board).

The light profiles was with a different instrument, and it had to be reeled down by hand. The crew were whining at me for all the line they had to put out and pull up and organize on deck, while I sat inside in the air conditioning and pressed buttons on the computer. ;) I couldn't do that, though. 10 meters worth of line hauling, and I would probably collapse. It sucks being a lifelong runt. :( In the deepest casts we were aiming for 150 meters, which was basically as far down as it'll go with the amount of line we had, and assumes that it goes straight down from the boat without drifting anywhere. It usually drifts. In the Gulf Stream, where the current is moving at 5 knots all by itself, the whole boat is drifting northward the whole time and we could barely get it to pass 100m on our first try. After that I think they turned the boat around and somehow managed to get it to go down vertically, so it went farther.

Then I got back yesterday and found my Alphasmart waiting for me. New toy! :) Wish it had come before I left, but I've been having fun playing with it. I can tell that I'm going to enjoy using it a lot. I might go back and get the accessories, but that'll be a bit later on. Next step is to order my new desktop, get all the other electronics toys to go with it (printer, scanner, etc), get the wireless network working in here, and figure out how to arrange everything in my living room.

If I'd had it on the boat with me, I would've been able to do a lot more writing than I did. I didn't sit idle on that front, though. Outlined out a fairly complex lengthy roleplay post I need to write, and jotted down some half-formed ideas for another one. Made a Hunter character that I need to finish writing up to submit. Came up with ideas for how to start off my Werewolf game. I'm still hoping to see a few more PCs before I start, but I need to write up a setting info thread at some point today. And I put in some more thought on what exactly to do with Stranger on a Bus but never got around to writing anything down.

Hmmm. Landsick. The room is kind of spinning and rocking back and forth in here... Heheh. I suspect it's going to be like that for the rest of the week. Oh well, at least it beats being seasick. ;)