Wednesday, December 21, 2016

December 21, 2016

We finally left Cape Town just a little short of midnight today, so officially marked our 24 hour at sea point.
It has been rather rocky ever since we left, becoming worse throughout the day. I will not lie to you, I felt sick most of the day. I think it was mainly due to my general exhaustion of the last week of port call. I needed that break honestly.
Once again both the crew and my fellow colleagues have been wonderful, helping me out with the tasks I needed to complete today and were not physically able to do. What would I have done without them? Alas, I have been helping out everyone a lot too. What a great group of people and I am lucky to be a part of it.

Science wise we did manage to do a test CTD cast today at 2 PM ship time (12 PM UTC). We only went to 200m, it was rather dangerous and rocky. The swell was up to 8 m when we pulled the rosette up - the crew thought that all scientists are a little crazy :).

One thing that I absolutely needed to get up for today was a boat drill. Happy to inform all of you that I "survived", emergency gear is ok and aside from a terrible smell inside the rescue boats they are ok, equipped with water, dry rations, satellite emergency finders etc.

The boat drill and the CTD cast (where I have to admit I was mainly observing) wiped me out and I went back to bed. I did try to help out with translating different minor and not so minor issues on the way, but I decided that my own personal wellbeing should come first. So I had the best nap before dinner and woke up feeling much better.


The weather is predicted to get worse tomorrow, so we are not doing another cast. I am planning to sleep it off and get more adjusted to the rocky seas cause there is more to come. Just to give my observant readers a point of reference - my cabin is one deck below the main deck - the row of windows in the orange: section 
 This is a picture of Tryoshnikov docked in Cape Town for your reference of how high the swell is. 

So today we had water splashing into our cabin window pretty much throughout all day. I wonder what "tomorrow will be worse" mean for our veto out of the window. I mean it changes, sometimes it water,and sometimes it is all clouds. Cool stuff when you are not sick because of it :).

We are also changing clock during the night tomorrow - we will go one hour ahead. Oh, and internet is very limited, so I no pictures so far. It might get a little better or it might get worse, hard to predict...
Till later,
Masha

P.S. That’s how the storm looked before midnight: the snapshot from Global winds map :



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