Programs Blog

Today, we woke up to a delicious breakfast of scones, blueberries and grapefruit, bacon, hard boiled eggs which then turned into deviled eggs for snack. At 11 AM we had a B Watch Meeting where we started by ranking how we’re feeling on a scale we made up. Ester ranked her day on the “Dinosaur Intelligence Scale”, highest is Trogodon (largest brain to body ratio of any dinosaur) and lowest is Stegosaurus. She was feeling like a Utahraptor this morning. Rai-Ching made a scale based on shoe coverage on feet, lowest is a piece of shoe sole attached to the feet with string, inspired by 2nd Mate Matt’s sandals; highest is a rain boot that goes up to the knees. She was feeling like a solid crocs that morning. After that, it started raining, so we went to the main salon to practice the proper terms to locate an object at lookout by finding people and objects around the room with a small boat model. Last but not least, we created a bucket list of things we wanted to do on the Cramer, like climbing aloft, hitting the triangle to notify the entire ship of meals/class, finding something wrong on boat-check and fixing it/telling someone, going swimming (+ walk the plank and jump off the ship), becoming a pirate ship, and identifying a new species of whales.

After delicious sandwiches for lunch we got started on our afternoon watch from 1300-1900. Rai-Ching, Neil, and Mikhail were assigned to lab and we accomplished a few weather checks, 6-minute observations of sea creatures, and after a lot of trial and error managed to measure and clean one singular sediment sieve. We were called to handle sails before class, then Rai-Ching rang the triangle bell to notify everyone class is starting in 10 minutes at 1430.

Parker saw 8 unicorns and Leila completed world domination using their magic.

During class, Nick and Theo sang the national anthem for 4th of July (it was tear jerking), C watch presented on comb jellies with extremely good illustrations, an Osprey landed on our mast and stayed there the entirety of class, and Jeff walked us through all the ocean features a CTD deployment can provide and how to graph each measurement. After class, we were going to do a scientific deployment of the CTD and Secchi Disk, unfortunately lightning was spotted exactly when the ship stopped (heaved to) and we were ready to send our gear into the ocean. We all went down to the main saloon to wait out the storm, playing a few good card games in the meantime, and went back on deck after the storm to clean up the sediment and set the mainsail with all hands from B and C Watches.

A butterfly landed on Hillary’s pants and a dragonfly also hitched a ride on the ship after the thunderstorm. We then had a delicious BBQ dinner of burgers, hot dogs, corn, and apple-cinnamon-oatmeal thing and cleaned up after dinner (struggling to fit corn into the hutches). Ester, Alden, and Greg went onto the bow to take photos, Neil went to the stern to take down the flag, and Rai-Ching folded the flag.

After an eventful day, a lot of people are now chilling on the deck playing music where Parker and Leila let out some fire freestyle.  Meanwhile C Watch has the deck and lab and is taking care of Cramer. Sailing away from shore and into the open ocean, we are excited to take on the challenging watch schedule fully instead of sticking to anchor watches at night. Happy Fourth of July! May the fourth be with you lol.

B Watch: Rai-Ching, Ester, Parker, and Neil