Jordan

Apr 042013
 
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Adam sending you this photo, the wind turbine above him partially disassembled since it stopped working – now no more than a hi-tech weather vane. (Credit: OAR Northwest)

900 miles to Miami

Power conservation continues. When we realized that the wind generator did not work and disconnected it, we also realized that we had only been using one of the three batteries for weeks and making it work. Now we had all three and the solar panels seemed to be charging them for us to have all the power we would seemingly ever need. Drunk with power, so to speak, we blasted content (some of which still has not been posted). A week or so later it became clear that even charging the three batteries, we were loosing 5 to 10 amps per day in running all of our communication and science equipment at full tilt. All this new power had raised our minimum standard for what we wanted our equipment to be able to do. In choosing priorities, we are desperate to keep the science equipment running.

The biggest loss is personal computer time. Think of how good a mail call makes you feel… and take that away. Continue reading »

Apr 012013
 
beard trimming time

Jordan finally sees his lips for the first time in 4 weeks.

Folks that know me – parents, friends, housemates – know that I am, for the most part, one of those people that wakes up happy and chipper and cannot really fathom why waking up is so painful for other people. Rarely can I sleep eight full hours. I’m lucky if I can stay in bed after six or seven hours of sleep. I know this annoys a lot of people, especially my brother who seems to suffer from this pain and makes it very vocal when he asks me to get him up. This morning I woke up for the fourth time in one day. It was just after mine and Pat’s two-hour sleep following our four-hour row. I felt like death warmed over, and finally made the connection: Waking up might be this painful for some people all the time! Oh the humanity! I swear, if this is you I will from this point on try to be more understanding. Continue reading »

Mar 282013
 
3-28-13 caribbean overlap

Moving west. Again. Caribbean in view (at least on Google Earth!)

Before pulling in the sea anchor this morning, we spent a good part of the last 24 hours slowly drifting with the wind and waves in a north-easterly direction. In the wee hours of the night, things let up and we were free from our weather shackles for the time being. As of now we’re about 1,100 nautical miles from Miami, and our longitude has us overlapping the eastern-most Caribbean island… I’ll take any milestone I can. Continue reading »

Day 62: Whales!!!

 Posted by at 2:20 pm  6 Responses »
Mar 252013
 
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The giant whale appeared on an unsuspecting day much like this one. Pat at the oars before the big splash.

The shape had hardly time to register in my mind.

When it did it was halfway into the water, and the MASSIVE splash seemed huge even from a half-mile away. It was a humpback, by our best guess… bubble net feeding, circling around the plankton that makes this massive mammal’s food, and making a net of  bubbles before diving down and shooting up into the center of the undisturbed water and eating tens of thousands of the tiny animals that sustain the world’s largest animal.

A moment later we felt that thump of the literal tons of whales landing. We were in the middle of nowhere and we were the only humans to see this. Continue reading »

Day 61: The dirty blog

 Posted by at 2:22 pm  3 Responses »
Mar 242013
 
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Markus breaks the confines of the Atlantic dry space for a dip in the blue, and a scrub of the hull.

[Greg here in Mission Control - I dug up this early blog that got posted but never went live for some reason. A good look at life on a tiny ocean rowboat reveals the reality of 4 men in a small space. Avert your reading eyes if you don't believe in the existence of bodily functions.]

I couldn’t believe it. To my profound horror it actually came in through the scupper. Could have been Markus, could have been me. Before we broke sea anchor this morning, both of us had to hot-seat the bucket. Usually the speed of the boat, slow as it may be, is enough to clear us of an incident like this, but not today on sea anchor when the four of us and anything that might be floating was doing so at the same rate. I won’t tell you what I had to do to get rid of it, but thank goodness for hand sanitizer.

Nasty business this ocean rowing. Nasty business. It’s actually a continuous editorial conversation we have with each other about what makes it into the blog and what doesn’t. What’s too gross? What’s too real? What’s not family-friendly enough? Right now I’m feeling pretty candid and don’t really want to sugar coat it. Continue reading »