Programs Blog

Monday, 24 February 2025

Noon Position: 36°50.503’S x 174°45.711’E

Log: 285.2

Weather: Sunny/ Wind Northwest at 4 knots

Description of location: Docked in Auckland

Kia ora from Auckland!!

What a wonderful first week aboard the Robert C. Seamans! Very hard to round it all up into one blog post but I will recap my favorite moments of the past six days. After leaving Whangarei, we had a well-timed swim call to refresh us after a few long days of orientation. Since then, we have been settling into our watches and routines, doing many boat checks, neuston tows, and sunset journalling sessions on the cabintop. I had my first dawn watch on a beautiful, perfectly breezy night on our way into the Hauraki Gulf. There were more stars in the sky then I have ever seen before, bioluminescent plankton in the boat’s wet lab, and delicious rice crispy treats for midnight rations. Feeling very lucky that I can stand at the helm with a hot cocoa on a night like that and call it school.

Our fearless captain Sean hit a huge milestone just yesterday! We were all happy to be apart of Sean’s 200,000th (recorded) nautical mile sailed. We celebrated this with sailboat shaped cookies and a song on the quarterdeck after docking in Auckland.

 We have been very busy exploring Auckland this past day and a half. It’s apparent that we have gotten used to being on the boat because we still feel the rocking motion as we walk around the city. Today many of us went to the Auckland Art Gallery and hiked all around downtown Auckland. We had our first field trip to the Auckland War Memorial Museum which has a wide spread of information on the history, culture, and nature in and around Auckland and Aotearoa New Zealand. Tom Trnski, the Head of Natural Sciences and Clinton Duffy, Curator of Marine Biology, gave us a behind the scenes tour of the natural history collections at the museum. The oldest specimen we saw were leaves collected from Captain Cook’s voyage in the 1700s. A few of us then followed him to a talk at a local dive shop about tracking oceanic manta rays around New Zealand. It is very exciting to be on land and discovering a new city, but I am looking forward to being back out at sea again on our long offshore trip down to Wellington.

I will leave you all with a proverb shared with us from one of the Maori iwis which gave us permission to do science samples on our trip:

Caitie McCabe, B Watch, Sarah Lawrence College

Some shoutouts—

Mom, Dad, Colin, and Oliver: Miss you and have fun on your travels!!

Happy late birthday Zainab !!

Hello to the rest of my friends and family reading this, miss you guys 🙂