19 July, 2:30 pm.
Our fourth day on the water. We have fallen into a pretty mind-numbing routine of getting up for meals, then retreating to our bunks to pass the time. After napping and reading and maybe even working on a laptop, you check your watch to see how much longer to the next meal. Another 3 hours? OK. Maybe I'll take another nap. Only 30 minutes? Hmmm. Maybe I'd better get up and stretch my legs a bit on deck before eating.....
We still have pretty moderate seas, but is it sill rough enough that sea-sickness can sneak up on you pretty quickly. Today's routine was punctuated by a meeting of all the chiefs and sub-chiefs to discuss the latest version of "the plan," and it is a VERY complicated one! We will have 5 teams working simultaneously:
- Joint US/Russian/Japanese archaeology field camp (Ben and Shubin's group)
- Joint US/Russian tsunami research camp (Jody's group)
- Joint US/Russian archaeology survey team (my group)
- Russian vulcanology team (Alexander Rybin's group)
- Japanese vulcanology team (Mitsuhiro Nakagawa's group).
And we hope to have all 5 teams working smoothly, more or less independently of the other groups (with some piggy-backing of boat shuttles). We may also have groups 2, 3 and 5 sharing a camp on Onekotan Island for a couple of days, but working in different areas of the island.
There are also some final preparations to be made before we reach Chirinkotan Island (sometime after midnight tonight). The zodiacs, which are the inflatable boats we use to travel from ship to shore, all need to be inflated and outfitted (see photo).
Sergei Chirkov, Kiril Ganzey, and Rafael Zharkov make final preparations on the fleet of zodiacs (inflatable boats) to be used by the various research teams in the Kurils.
Fuel tanks need to be filled. Food supplies need to be set aside. Field equipment lists need to be double-checked. But, as much work as this sounds like it might be, we have over 30 field crew members on board. So the majority of us just tuck into our bunks, maybe watch a DVD or three, and wait for the next meal-time. We've been on a pretty steady routine of kasha (hot cereal of one grain or another) in the mornings, with kielbasa and cheese on the side; for lunch and dinner we get soup starters, followed by either pork, beef, chicken, or fish cutlets with a choice of rice, potatoes, or macaroni. In addition to cooking really tasty food, the galley staff are really very considerate of the folks who are sea-sick, and also will have just plain rice and a clear broth soup-delivered to your bunk, if need be! Fortunately, my level of sea-sickness hasn't been too bad, and I have not had to skip any meals yet.
This will mark the beginning of our field work, which everyone is very excited about. But it will probably also mark the end of daily journal postings, for lots of different reasons. Once we start in with the work, I will have much less free time to spend composing the entries.
But also, I will have much less reliable access to a power source to charge the satellite phone (both of the batteries sent with the phone have trouble keeping a charge). And, as an extension of that, photos are taking much longer to upload than we had hoped. A couple of times this week BOTH batteries ran out of juice before I was able to send all of the text files plus the images!
So if you don't hear from us for a few days, don't worry: we're just getting a lot of great science done!
Wink
---Dr. E