Programs Blog

Sunday, May 10, 2026.

Noon Position: (Lat and Long): 37 degrees 37.8’ N, 070 degrees 52.2’ W

Log (nm): 2774 nm

Weather / Wind / Sail Plan (from 1300 Watch Change): Motoring under the stays’ls, main engine turning at 1300 RPM, c/o 005 degrees PSC, winds light and variable, visibility restricted by haze.

Description of location: Underway in North Atlantic

So here’s how I ended up writing four blogs – I signed up for two like any other random student before leaving for St. Croix, and then the opportunity just kept presenting itself, and so here I am. Did you guys miss me yet? Hahahahaha.

This is the fifth iteration of this blog. This is because all progress that I saved of an old version deleted itself in the working document everyone on the ship writes their blogs in. I don’t know how it happened because I hit Ctrl+S every five seconds, out of force of habit from working at a newspaper for three years, but it did happen, and I contemplated a lot about life and Sisyphus’ boulder and admitting defeat. You are now reading an abbreviated version of the original blog, which is my attempt at making the Sisyphean boulder smaller and choosing a sort of half-baked, dogged perseverance that arises from extreme sleep deprivation. Here we go!

First off, happy very belated Mother’s Day to all mothers. I would not have done all the things I do in this life without my mother, and I think there are many people on this ship who share the same sentiment, so I make this wish on behalf of the Cramer!

Second off, happy college graduation to all my senior friends around the world! To my friends at Grinnell – Candice, Parikshit, Chika, Saki, Phuong, Amy, Audra, Hunter, shabab, Koobi Fora’s Team Pliocene – Theo, Conner, Sarah, Annie, and, of course, my friends back in Singapore – Jun We, Glenda, Wen Hui and Stevie, congratulations!! Sorry I can’t be there – I am, after all, halfway across the world in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean!

Back to business.

In all iterations of this blog, I struggled very hard to share all the stories I wanted to share about this ship. I just could not figure out what the common thread was behind all these stories I wanted to share – I kept typing and deleting, typing and deleting, which is probably why the entire thing just gave up and died itself at some point. But I have figured it out. The theme of this particular blog will be people.

Now that we have crossed the Gulf Stream, we have entered the Land of Whale and Dolphin and Shark Sightings. Whenever someone on deck spots the faraway tail of a big animal surfacing over the water, the alert spreads quickly by mouth, and everyone who is interested abandons whatever they’re doing – work, food, sleep – to rush up to deck and see it – pods of dolphins, extending all the way to the horizon line, or big pilot whales, solitary, their tails majestically careening over the yolk of the setting sun before dipping back down into the water with a ceremonious white splash.

On one particular occasion, I was lucky enough to be on lookout when a small pod of dolphins came up to the bow – first-class seats! I think they fancy the Cramer as a delightful new underwater playground, especially when she’s motoring, so they come in droves and swim and play and zip all around the hull, unaffected by the rising and dropping of the bowsprit into the water. They somersault, they dance. They are Atlantic white-bellied dolphins, so you can see their smooth grey fins cleanly cut through the water as they surface, before coming back down in a graceful arch, and then you can see their white bellies glowing a luminous green in the water as they playfully roll about with each other. They particularly enjoy gathering together under the build-up of a swell, rising together with it, and then getting dumped back below the surface.

Not many people will, in their lifetime, get to see these beautiful animals like dolphins and whales up close in their natural habitat, without the barriers of thick plexiglass or television screens. These dolphins, they don’t like staying in order. They leap from port to starboard to front to aft, so you really can’t count how many there actually are. They gather in pairs, split off to frolick on their lonesome, then bunch up together again in threes and fours and fives, swimming all on top of each other in their own little frenzies. You are out there on lookout at the bow, there truly is no one else but you, those dolphins, and the roaring of the waves in your ears.

Sometimes after class, people stay behind to hang out. Class is the only time of day everyone on the ship is awake, and we use this time valuably. We don’t stay in one place very often – every time someone gets up to leave, another person comes up on deck. Some people take their instruments up to the charthouse top to play music together. Some people take their books up to the lab top. Some people stay on the quarterdeck, some move to a deck box – to talk, to drink tea, to journal, to make art. Some people don harnesses and go out on the headrig or aloft to bask in the view.

In the evenings, the sextants start coming out for star frenzy (you can read Sophie’s and Zara’s blogs on how star frenzies work). Once the sun gets too low and you can no longer see the horizon line, everyone troops back indoors to calculate navigational positions, and then they trickle down to the main salon – for tea, hot chocolate, snacks – and even more talking. People gather around the settees outside bunks and continue to giggle about their day in hushed tones. Some people start making moves to extricate themselves, to retire to their bunk, to prepare for their next watch. But then someone else says something really funny, and then they invariably get pulled back into the conversation, and this goes on another four times, everyone saying they have to go, but no one truly wanting to leave.

In the short story Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, a troubled protagonist, a mother, realises that her daughter is her “heart lamp” – the light of her dreary and unfortunate life, and the entire motivation for her existence. Not many people will, in their lifetime, find someone they can idly chat with at any time of the day – someone who will make themselves available for you, someone who will sit with you to take pictures and paint watercolours and play card games and to just talk with you for the sake of it. Not many people will get to curl up on someone’s shoulder, or on their lap, or by their side, and take an afternoon nap bathing in the rays of the sun, with the gentle rocking of the ship beneath. Not many people will be able to place their hands in the hands of someone else they wholly trust and have that person hold them back and mean it.

On a calm and warm afternoon, class involved everyone getting into groups and writing a poem together using phrases from the Beaufort wind scale, each group member contributing one stanza. At the end of it, Tenny and I both wanted to keep the poem our group had made up. Tenny folded the paper into half along the long end and gingerly tore it into two with his own fingers, glueing his half of the poem to his book – the start of all the lines going to him, and the latter end of the sentences going to me.

On a rolly and swelly evening, just right after we had crossed the Gulf Stream (and met some very unfortunate weather along with it – do ask your family member who was on this cruise trip about the 2am Olive Chronicles), I climbed up to the lab top with Ciaran, and we laid out our watercolours and tried soaking up inspiration from the howling, steely grey seas. But even with such a majestic sight – an amalgamation of angry storm clouds, the waves rising and crashing down onto deck, water sloshing down the sides of the deck – I somehow just wasn’t feeling it. So I asked Ciaran what his favourite colours were and ended up painting on a small postcard this vast field, covered in a sea of yellow flowers, little lanterns aglow amidst grasses of teal blue and forest green.

On a dark night, with all the stars twinkling in the sky, a Neuston net was dropped in the water, glowing a beautiful white, like sparkles of snow, like glitter, like a pale ghost in the night, the lines tying the net to the boom coasting through the water and leaving trails flitting behind like silver streamers. Looking up, the masts seemed to have become a metre net of their own, the lines running down to deck cupping the constellations as they moved through the night sky on their own journeys. When the net was brought back on board, it contained a whopping 10 litres of medusa jellies, and at least 40 myctophids. Under the microscope, when the light catches them just right, these myctophids have scales that glow an incandescent blue-green-purple, and photophores coloured a unique indigo blue, and the colours sway almost as if in tune with the googly-eyed disco ball that hangs from Cramer’s lab ceiling.  On other similar nights, atop a deck box, accompanied by Scorpio, the Big Dipper, the Celestial G, Orion, we sat with our shoulders pressed flush and we talked, and encased behind our ribcages we had our hearts twinkling, like the planets in the sky, the gemstone scales of a fish, the lights of ship traffic, disco hour, and they were laughing and crying and singing and confused all at the same time, the distance between our eyes so small and yet so infinitely far.

When I was younger, a teacher I once had told me that the only thing I should be focused on was working hard, and that my back should always be bent and I should only be looking down to focus on my own work and not others’ such that one day, I would raise my head and suddenly find that I had already reached the very top, with no one else around me. But if you want to go aloft on Cramer, all the way to the second platform of the foremast, you need to always be looking up. And once you’re at the top, there’s actually a lot of space – space for four people and not just one, enough for all the students of C Watch, so everyone can climb up and stand together. And you find that you really aren’t just standing up there alone – around you there are birds, and jellyfish, and small houses and cars whizzing past, and endless green waters and baby blue skies, punctuated by cotton-candy clouds and ripples of waves and all the living things that you can see in it and also can’t see but are most certainly there. And you can also all start singing and dancing really loudly, about country roads and wooden pigeons and running away from your regal responsibilities to an ice palace, and you can accept song requests from the people on deck.

Of course, the postcard that I had painstakingly created on the lab top until my back started to ache was also instantly snatched out of my hands by the winds the moment it was completed, into a giant wave which eagerly gulped the postcard down to the depths, never to be seen again. On this ship, most people don’t really use their phones – mine hasn’t been charged in weeks – and so it really is just a matter of accepting that you’ll look at a lot of things here for one good, long time, and then it’s gone forever. The blood red moon that slowly pokes its head out on the horizon and rises to dominate the night, the green flash of that last sliver of sun disappearing beneath a lemonade pink ocean, the clouds parting at just the right moment so white rays from the sun can drape themselves like a translucent veil over a section of the waves. The people on this boat are hence a very creative bunch, with many prolific artists, writers, photographers, and musicians, all doing their very best to preserve these wonderful memories of the ocean in their own neat ways. Personally, I love using photography the most, and I love handing my camera off to people, to see what photos they take with their own wonderful perspectives.

There is a book in the charthouse called the People’s Orders, which is a parody of the real book of night orders written by Captain Allison, and then there is a book in the lab for Lab Haikus, which looks exactly like the composition books that contain project data and official science orders written by Sarah. In those books respectively are highly specific logs of random silly things that happen throughout the day and poems written by watch members on their lab rotation, complete with a timestamp and writer attributions. Each and every single entry is beautifully and verbosely composed; without our phones and our laptops, we can only rely on the power of pens and our own hands and brains, which is a most delightful thing. I have decided I will end this blog by sharing some of my poetry with you, which cannot possibly be very good, but one thing refreshing about the people on Cramer is that everyone is so unashamed about everything, especially their creative pursuits, so here we go:

Archaeological Excavation

On the sands of a beach

far away and right here

blue waves, green crests, white foam

lapping on toes, on

picnic blankets and mats

on fingers, on rubbish, on crabs and

anemones

Surveys of the intertidal

of worm tunnels, of shells and rocks

of branches and driftwood

footprints next to fish bones

a barbecue, a camp, some music, rented bikes

A long time ago, we must have walked these same shores somewhere different

maybe one in their gumboots, the other in sandals

a mother and child

two sisters

two lovers

two friends

two species

you,

and I.

Natalie Ng, C Watch

Simon and I laying together on the quarterdeck. Photo by me

Signing off from the helm 😊 Photo by Simon Braun (on my camera!)