Guess what - I CLIMBED SO MANY LESS STAIRS TODAY! Life is good - I found the people I needed to find, I only almost fell on the ground due to wave swells like 5 times AND I helped conduct a part of an oceanographic study today! We are KILLING IT!!! Luckily for me, there was more down time today than yesterday which allowed for one of my favorite past-times - getting to know the people around me! Everyone on this vessel both The Ocean Cleanup crew as well as the Maersk Launcher crew has wonderful insights into sailing, the ocean, and/or myriad other topics that I don't even think to ask about but get to learn about anyway! This afternoon was spent sitting in the sun shooting the breeze with one of my fellow crew mates where we talked and talked about environmentalism, fisheries, and the funny qualities of life - like how you can plan and plan for things to happen but in the end you end up somewhere else entirely, or get there circuitously. Another wonderful experience was getting to talk to our cook, who is also a woman working in a male-dominated industry. We talked about that for a while and what it's like to work on a vessel like this - the people working offshore work on for 6 months out of the year and spend 6 months of the year off, though usually this is separated into chunks of time. On the Launcher that means 6 weeks on and 6 weeks off, though where you get dropped off the boat might be a completely different CONTINENT from the place you call home. I don't think I'd ever thought about how the shipping industry works, but I think I'll take my relatively stable academic calendar with set breaks over this schedule. We shall see. Speaking of spending a long time on boats, I'm hoping that by the end of a week I will adjust to the constant rolling onboard - this morning I almost fell into my trashcan in my room as I was putting my shirt on for the day because the boat pitched in an unexpected direction as I had both my arms tangled up in the relatively simple task of putting on clothes. :D I laugh a lot because I find it amazingly funny to have everything I've known turned on its head (at least that's how it feels for now). Showering for the first time as the boat was rolling was a very funny experience - they have bars for you to hold on to in the shower and I remember looking at them in port wondering if I would use them. Now the name of the game is mostly trying to wedge myself into the corner of shower and try to work up a lather on my bar of soap with my hands before the boat pitches the other direction. Like I said, I laugh a lot - these situations are just not normal in my day to day life! Honestly all of this craziness has made me wonder more about how astronauts do it - at least there's mostly normalcy on the boat - in space EVERYTHING has to be different! It's a crazy world we live in!
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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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March 2021
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