Programs Blog

Thursday, 16 April, 2026.

Noon Position: (Lat and Long): 25 degrees 52.9’ N, 062 degrees 56.6’ W

Log (nm): 827.1 nm

Weather / Wind / Sail Plan: Sailing under the four lowers and a bout of much-needed sunlight – albeit with some three-minute passing showers here and there! Tropics, am I right…

Description of location: Still gallivanting around the Nares Abyssal Plain, South Sargasso Sea

In the Charlie Chaplin’s Cheesecake Chaos C(h)ooking Chihuahua Chiefdom (The Seven C’s, or just C Watch), everyone is assigned an official role in watch rotation, and report to Marija and Raechel, our Deck Overlords (mate and marine tech).

On deck, which was Squall City these past few days but is now Sunshine Land once more, there are four titles you rotate around during the six hours of a watch: the Lookout Knight, which is basically a free ticket to Splash Mountain at the current moment; the Boat Check Jester, who scurries and dances and scampers all over and below deck making sure nothing is epically on fire; the Weather/Nav Scribe, who sagely determines and records our weather condition and log using the ever-handy VectorMaster (of which I have been VectorVictim, because it does require understanding of math of a higher order to use); and lastly, Deck Prince – helm royalty, overseeing all from behind the steering wheel.

Some watches, you might also tap in as a Dish Serf, or Dishcotheca, where you spend a glorious hour doing the dishes in the company of the Galley Overlords Shelby and Sally, who are fantastic company to do dishes with, and who also let you scrape and eat the remnants of raw batter off the mixing bowl before you wash it. Also, on this trip, everyone has to serve as the Galley Boy (student steward) twice – and we are all Galley Boys when it’s our day to StuStew, regardless of individual gender identity.

The position that is currently most dear to my heart, however, is Lab Princess. This is because I have been Lab Princess for the last three watches! Lab Princesses hang out indoors in the comfort and safety of the Lab and assist Deck Overlord Raechel. Make no mistake, however, Lab Princesses perform an extremely vital role for the smooth running of Science on the ship. They deploy the Neuston tows and hydrocasts every morning and evening watch, sort and weigh all the Sargassum and biomass collected, complete highly precise and nuanced DNA extraction protocols at 4a.m., and do 100-counts, which is when we separate, identify, and count 100 zooplankton from the general Neuston tow gloop – all while trying not to smash their faces into the microscope or fall into the sink as the ship bends 45 degrees to the right, jumps up six feet into the air, and then maybe hits a barrel roll while we’re at it too.

It’s undeniably and most objectively the best role you could get assigned in this Chiefdom, because if you’re not participating in the highly coordinated launches of giant nets and metal contraptions off the side of the ship (involving many lines and sails and knots and button-pressing), then you’re looking at buckets and petri dishes of adorable little critters, from mysids and euphausiids and button-shaped jellies to gelatinous larvae and tiny Sargasso crabs and even fish! Last evening there were flying fish, myctophids, which are what Lyra, Everett and I are studying for our research project, and even the larva of a dragonfish, which, as a relation of the anglerfish, lives in the deep mesopelagic, is rarely collected from surface waters, and is sorely understudied in our oceans. So that was a sick catch.

(To get to these cool critters under the microscopes you do have to first trawl through Copepod City in the petri dishes, population one gazillion. But copepods are incredibly vital in marine ecosystems, and at night they are responsible for creating these beautiful blue bioluminescent sparks across the crests of the deep black waves, like currents of electricity, splashing all over the sides of our ship.)

Lab Princess, however, is NOT the role you might wish to do on dawn watch in Squall City, Swell County, United States of Bad Weather 22064. Especially when you’ve spent the entire day being thrown around in your bunk on an empty stomach. Some people living in the main salon described sleeping during the swells as being rotated gently like a rotisserie chicken, but I don’t think rotisserie chickens have unidentified bruises dotting their limbs. Really, if you live up front in the fo’c’sle, it’s more like being violently catapulted around like a pinball in an arcade machine. But do not be put off by this description; it can also be very fun because your entire body gets airtime when Mama Cramer lurches up and slams herself back down into the water. Anyways, during dawn watch, Raechel, Simon and I were definitely losing it from the sleep deprivation, because we spent about three minutes squabbling over what 26 – 8 was (options thrown out included 18, 17, and 14), Simon flopped to the ground in the middle of DNA extraction like four times, and I asked Raechel if I could go to the bathroom in a sentence that sounded more like “Can I May I permission to go to have use [unintelligible] THE HEAD.” When I looked out a porthole in the lab, I saw that the sky was no longer pitch black but wet cement blue. At that moment, I heard the distinctive twinkling chime in the back of my head that plays in the smash indie game Five Nights at Freddy’s when you’ve survived a night fending off the evil animatronics in the restaurant that come to life and want to kill you, but then the realisation dawns that there are still four more nights to go.

I know it honestly just sounds like I do not have a good time being Lab Princess, but that is untrue. Weird Tummy Time aside, you get to put a lot of fish in a Situation, which is essentially shoving them into little 1.5mL vials and cryopreserving their tissue in a freezer box under the sink. You also get to hang out with Süpi, the Molecular TA, and Aiden, the Fish TA, who spawn in at random hours throughout the night. Süpi walks you through a 13-step DNA extraction protocol like cake walk, which is very helpful when you’re at a point in the watch where the English alphabet is starting to look like glyphs. Aiden, who is immediately summoned from his slumber into the lab whenever a fish is spotted in a Neuston tow, says things like “life is Roblox” and “five big booms” to a particularly cool find, which happens more often than you think, because we are all nerds who chose to live on a tall ship for six weeks and so many things are a cool find to us.

But just like how FNAF immediately sends you into the Second Night after surviving the First Night with zero respite, and just like how you’re somehow always going into a shift when you’re actively working in any customer service job ever, time flies by weird here. As Tenny wisely said in a previous blog, you’re technically running on 18 hour-days and not the usual 24. Yet, it doesn’t even feel like 18-hour days because you’re always clocking in and clocking out, and then spending time doing random side quests, so time goes by slowly, but also really fast. It’s Monday one day and Thursday the other. People are always hanging out in the main salon, hanging out on the quarterdeck, hanging out on top of science deck, hanging out on top of the charthouse (Lyra observed this in yesterday’s blog: people really love hanging out in high places here), or maybe sitting in the chart house itself staring at the Nautical Almanac and wrangling with time zones and twilights and Local Apparent Noons, before whipping out the sextants to shoot suns and stars. If you choose to do this last side quest, remember not to trip and fall face-first with the sextant in front of Captain Allison. I’m totally not advising from personal experience.

Three days ago, Simon, Etta, and I completed a particularly fun side quest – laying out on the head rig in the middle of giant swells, after our morning watch. We clipped in and sat down and got dunked about five times by the ocean as Mama Cramer leapt up and down, which was so awesome! And then Sara came and asked us to get off the head rig because A Watch was going to set the JT (jib topsail), but then asked us to clip back into the bowsprit to unfurl the JT since we were already there anyways, and then she had us haul on the halyard to raise the JT. Side quest in a side quest. Although, quoting Simon, she had basically asked the three weakest people on the ship (I don’t think Simon and Etta are weak but he did size my capabilities up pretty well) to haul a line that was like a billion metres long, and so we were spinning all around the port side and heaving and hooting and hollering for what felt like 45 minutes, JT sadly flapping and complaining the entire time it went up.

Oh, and we also WON the pin chase. Liam is LYING and spreading FICTITIOUS RUMOURS, and Mama Cory does not take kindly to LIARS. Some of us members might be lacking in brawn, but the Charlie Chaplin’s Cheesecake Chaos C(h)ooking Chihuahua Chiefdom have brains, and we knew every line ever. Jakob was in his bunk playing Mario Kart about an hour before it began, but he really locked in at that last moment, studied up, and identified the last line – the Conga Line – beautifully, and we assembled into a train and did a loop around the ship into first place. It was a glorious day. And then I showed up to dawn watch delirious and sleep-deprived, because again time goes by strange here and it was 1430 but suddenly it’s 0050 and you didn’t get the wake-up call for some reason and Raechel is now standing ominously outside your bunk. You know the rest of what happened after.

Anyways, it seems like many people have been ending their blogs by dedicating it to beloved friends and family members. I don’t remember anyone’s birthdays ever (all that memory went to remembering the pins and lines), so I consulted this giant WhatsApp message I sent myself a long time ago which lists everyone’s birthdays ever, and realised that really, no one I know who I can dedicate a blog to without it being a bit awkward has a birthday during the time of our cruise. But, as I’ve come to realise, time is made up. So happy birthday to all the members of my family – Mummy and Daddy and Gonggong and Mama and Ah Gong and Ah Ma and Liz and Hlin and Lau Yee 1 and Lau Yee 2 and Lao Gu and Lao Ma and Ah Jek 1 and Ah Jek 2 and Lao Jek and Godma and Godpa. And a big happy birthday to the friends at college who I sit with most regularly for lunch and dinner, I guess, Amy and Alex and Isaiah and Regann and Christian and Nicole and Nicky and Jude and Tyler and Gio and AJ. Maybe you can connect with them on LinkedIn so that we can all hit 500 connections and find jobs before we graduate. Perhaps a certain pizzeria is looking for a night guard, although the animatronics do get a little… strange… at night…

Natalie Ng, C Watch

Just hangin’ out. Photo by me

Natalie laying out on the headrig! Photo by Simon Braun

Bonus: Dragonfish under the microscope! Photo by Aiden Houlihan