Deep water horizon

My blog and lookout spot on Okeanos

So its been 5 days at sea now on the awesome NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer. At first I was running around trying to figure everything out at once (not working out so well) but after a couple of days we all started to get into life at sea and the work here pretty good. We are about 25 people onboard this boat (have not counted yet..) and everybody seems to have some pretty cool life experience. The ship itself provides really great food, a gym, a gaming room, library and most important an ice cream freezer without a lock.
Needless to say I am pretty happy with the comforts here, especially since my days camping in Key West living off insects and leafs.

Survey control room

A short update of what we are doing. The main mission for this cruise is to figure out how and how well we can map gas plumes in the deep waters of the mexican gulf with multibeam echosounders. After calibrations procedures outside Key West, we have spend the last few days few days on transit from Key West towards the Deepwater Horizon oilspill site using the time for staff training (i.e. making me stop run around like a lost and) of the ships sonars systems and getting in to our rutines.

Important calibration procedures

We have just arrived to the Deepwater Horizon site, after a quite minute for the dead at sea we have now started fine tuning our systems to see gas plumes around this site. My shift start at 16 - 00, and I spend the rest of the time extracting knowledge from all the great reaserchers onboard this boat, and also to eat cookies and ice cream.

Sunrise and the giant soccer ball we call home

Ironicaly while I went to sea in nice calm weather there has been both a earth quake and now a hurricane that has hit Baltimore and the whole east coast of the US, hope everybody is safe and sound and that there is still something left there to return to in October. Take care all you people in Baltimore!

Time to go back to the dungeons.