Just another day

This Juvenile Booby Bird showed no respect for "our" territory, and
promptly made Nancy Foster its home for a day.

I later found him sleeping (and pooping) in a sun chair,
first thinking somebody forgot their feather boa (I know thats a
weird thought, but it was very dark...)  up there and almost picked him up.

It's pretty much the usual suspects out here. The birds, the whales, the sun, the ocean, the science team, the ship crew, the Swede. 

Never leave your camera behind. I should have learned by now. When this Humpback
Whale suddenly surfaced 20 meters from me I had the camera on the other end of the ship.
Managed to get this picture before it disappeared with a waving fin. 

Life on the NOAA Ship Nancy Foster has settled into its daily routines. Eat, eat, eat, watch a movie - repeat. For the Science crew that means seafloor mapping during the nights and ROV diving during the days. My shift ends in the early morning so I sleep until lunch, start my new day with a hefty meal, then check if there is anything exciting going on during the ROV dives, and if not I go up and digest my full stomach on the sun deck when the weather permits (yes, that is almost every day :).

Nick has a trustworthy beard and loves fishing,
needless to say high up on my favorite ship crew list 

Even though we work were we sleep, meaning you are always on call if need be, there is something pretty relaxing about being on a ship and not have to worry about anything except what is going on right here (minus a river of emails) right now. I wouldn't want to do this all the time, but for a change it really is a pretty nice life. On the other hand I have only been to the gym once here. I have found it way too easy to get yet another ice cream instead, or go and snooze away my constantly sleep deprived body. Probably a good thing we are moving into shore in a few days for a break.  

Inspecting one of two small gopro cameras I attached
on the ROV to film some of the action

Aside from the Habitat Mapping work I do onboard I have set out to capture some video from the life onboard (In the wake of my Jan Mayen movie screening in Annapolis I have mistakenly been assigned to be the ship videographer, they seems to be oblivious that I do not have any idea what I am doing). So I have started capturing some of the action on the ship, yesterday I strapped a my gopro camera on the ROV to get some shots of the ROV itself when it was working, turned out to be a great idea, and I even got the camera back in one piece. 

GoPro photo of the ROV working at 30 meters depth

Action in the ROV control room

Sloppy mappers (I am one of them) moving the lawn, i.e. watching multibeam  data come in

Another one of my "great" ideas is to capture time laps photography from different part of the ship. I hide my little camera in various locations to capture the life onboard over the span of a few hours. Not exactly what everyone want when they wake up to get a bit to eat and then realise they are on the candid camera. But what don't you do to get the good shots? Anyway, unless somebody is wise enough to throw my camera over board I will get you guys a little movie of "a day on the Nancy Foster" in due time.

Roger

Copy That

Mums

Yes, of course we have a golf car

Abandon ship(!) exercise just as I had fallen asleep. The night shift have its perks...

 Two days to we hit port, in a few hours we have some rock and roll weather coming up as we are leaving the shelter of Vieques Island where we have been hiding from the raging seas for the last few days. Time to catch up on that sleep...