Adventures Aboard SSV Corwith Cramer: From Phytoplankton Hunts to Swim Calls

Skyla and Megan  

What’s good, party people? (Skyla’s quote) This is Skyla and Megan here, reporting from the SSV Corwith Cramer, somewhere close to Boston. We got woken up early to have some cowboy breakfast and work on our OC projects. There are three projects. One is the hunt for phytoplankton city, so looking for where we find the most phytoplankton at each of our sampling stations. One is studying deep sea sediments, so comparing the five sediment grabs we’ve collected along our cruise track and comparing the sediments we found and the critters we found. Megan is doing a creature feature on the boring sponge that we found living on one of the rocks that came up. The last is the zooplankton project looking at differences between day and night tows and between different areas. The projects are progressing nicely, and we’ll be presenting our results in some posters tomorrow. We also got to go aloft on the foremast. It was a little scary, but fun at the end. We were glad we did it and would do it again. Thane, Jeremy, and Margaux helped with the aloft training and taught us how to climb the ratlines safely and clip in to the secure, steel parts of the ship.  

After lunch, we had field day, which is not quite as fun as it sounds. We had to deep clean the ship, but we made it fun with lots of music and dancing with our friends. Zach was singing ‘Cupid’ in the galley so loud that you could hear it on deck. After field day, we opened the pool off the ship for a swim call, which was very exciting for everyone on the ship. The water was pretty cold, but you got used to it. We had a lot of people jump off the headrig into the water. People who were scared to jump off the headrig on our last swim call tried it this time and conquered their fears. Overall, it was a really fun afternoon. Tomorrow we look forward to Swizzle where we’ll share our talents and celebrate the community we’ve built. 

Skyla and Megan  

Megan jumping off the headrig