A big part of starting This Blog is Trash was to show people what my favorite parts of being a marine biologist were – a big piece of which is spending time on the water, starting with my time offshore with The Ocean Cleanup on the Maersk Launcher. The majority of time I’ve spent on the water on boats has been day sails and whale watching trips, but since grad school, I’ve had a few opportunities to spend days on end on boats out in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Sea of Cortez on power boats and sailboats. While powerboats are fun and a great way to get around, sailing has captured my imagination since I was a little girl, and it’s been impossible for me to turn down any opportunities to go sailing. I love sailing... a lot... here's me at the helm! Due to the Covid pandemic, my dream job of sailing and teaching about marine conservation up in Seattle was responsibly and understandably put on an indefinite hold. This put a rather large and sailboat shaped hole in my heart, so when my friend asked if I wanted to help him sail his sailboat from Miami to Annapolis this summer, I said yes before I’d even processed what the question was. As an idea, sailing is the best – time out on the water for days on end, moving under the power of Mother Nature and nothing but ocean all around? Let’s GO! The reality of sailing is a little more complex - working with the wind means that we are at the mercy of the elements which are not known for bending to our plans. In addition, in order to go sailing on a long trip like the one we find ourselves on, there are a number of checks and work that needs to be done before you can even leave. Before setting sail from Miami we had to go digging around in the engine and check all the different fluids – coolant and oil and transmission, oh my! I can’t say that up until this point in my life I’ve spent a whole lot of my time thinking about how engines function but as the only other member of this trip, you can BET I now know which parts of this one particular engine are which (okay so maybe I only know where the transmission and cooling chamber is just by looking at it BUT THAT’S A BIG STEP FOR ME). After making sure that everything was functional/full/running, the next step is to prep your living space for life on an angle. This is something that I always forget about – when under sail, your world goes from flat like the ground in most of the rest of your life (short of like stairs and I guess hiking) to a few degrees heeled over to one side. Add in some fun wave action and suddenly you find yourself on a rollercoaster where your living space is constantly shifting and tipping. How do you prep for a world of constant tipping? For one you pack EVERYTHING up – anything taller than a coffee mug (and even that sometimes) is liable to fall over in the shifting seas on S/V Kismet. What’s nifty about a sailboat that’s designed to go around the world is they have PREPPED the boat for the constant change – the stove rocks back and forth sort of like a gyroscope so we can make coffee while underway – WHICH IS SO COOL! Additionally, there are SO MANY PLACES to hold onto while inside – it’s unexpected when you’re not moving, but while moving it is SO IMPORTANT to have places to hold on because otherwise you go flying across the cabin in big waves (yes, I am speaking from experience). Under sail on the Atlantic, somewhere off south Florida The first couple days of sailing were idyllic – we had just enough wind to push us at a whopping 6.5 knots (or nautical miles per hour) to travel all the way to Stuart, Florida before Hurricane Isaias came creeping up the Caribbean and Southeastern Coast of Florida. In general, wind is a good thing for a sailboat, to an extent. Hurricanes can cause all kinds of damage from the possibility of pulling us off our anchor to whipping out the sails and causing a lot of damage to them. With Isais chasing us faster than initially predicted, we had to stop to prep the boat. Seeing as this was my first hurricane dealing with a boat, I was a little nervous but we did everything we could to keep ourselves and Kismet as safe as possible. Prep for this storm involved finding an anchorage in a mangrove estuary in Stuart, Florida. Mangroves provide a number of helpful ecosystem services, but are especially effective as windbreaks - which served us immensely well. For other prep, we put out two anchors 45 degrees apart and battened down the hatches (!!! fun nautical terms that finally apply!) while we waited on the storm. Battening down the hatches may be a bit of an exaggeration, but we did put vaseline on all the of the hatches, which helps them keep a good seal in the rain, took down the shade structure on the back of the boat called a “bimini”, and putting extra zip ties on the solar panels to keep them down. Luckily, Isaias was kind to us – the storm was downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm before it made landfall near us, and during a lull in the winds, we were even able to move anchorages and find a new spot to hang out and wait for the seas to calm down before a short offshore hop to South Carolina. Though we’re still in the first week of our journey, I find it so crazy that this is a lifestyle that lots of people lead – the cruising life is sorta like long term tent camping – your entire existence revolves around the sun, rain, tides, and wind. It’s so cool to tune back in with nature and check out from electronics for a little bit - a win-win! Plus I’ve been getting to see some of my favorites in the ocean – dolphins and flying fish galore and hopefully will be seeing lots and lots of stars when we go offshore. The sunsets have been pretty killer this trip
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AuthorBree Gibbs, here. I'm a recent Master's Grad just trying to share what it's like to be a trash scientist (for those who aren't in the know, I'm a marine biologist). Categories
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