Day 8-10: Sea Life

I took this one on of the windows of sunshine we had one of the these last few days. After several days of very calm weather, now we're heading into stormy seas again.

Copyright (c) 2010 Wendee Holtcamp

For days we've seen no land, nothing but gray clouds and water (and the occasional patch of blue sky and sun like we had a few days back). So you can imagine the excitement of seeing an island! We went past St. Paul n the Pribilofs yesterday. I recorded a podcast and audio slideshow for Adventures in Climate Change which should be up Monday so keep an eye out for it! Nothing much new here, other than we have traversed down the NP (Nunavak-to-Pribilof) transect which runs southwest and for whatever reason the internet does not work when the boat goes in a southwesterly direction. We've had short windows when we're on a "station" when the boat turns just-so, and we can quickly download email or tweet or whatever. We're just at the end of that transect, at one of the deepest stations on the trip - around 8,900 feet. We're sending decorated styrofoam cups down on the CTD to watch them shrink like shrinky-dinks (that was a big thing for kids in the 1970s!). I'll report back with a photo once they're back up. The CTD is coming up from depth as I write this. Here are some random photos from the past few days.

Chief Scientist David Shull's calendar shot. It's a bit shaded because of his hard hat but I think this is a nice photo of him, don't ya think?
Yesterday some of the guys went fishing. They caught a halibut! Capt. John cuts it up with Colin.
Some nice halibut steaks here, aye?

When the waves got really big, spinning on this chair was like a ride at Disney World! What can I say? One has to find something to entertain oneself at sea...
Roger needed a hug.
A shot of the rarely seen bue sky in the Bering Sea!
There's a high school teacher on board, Jason Pavlich, and he has this funny sticker on his computer. He is blogging from the boat for his Red Hook High School here.
Sean got this cool crab in the Van Veen Grab sediment sample.
In the bin where it was sitting with all th eother organisms, it covered itself with "stuff" so I put it a couple things on it to show how it did that in this pic here under the scope.
The Van Veen brought up a whole ton of brittle stars of all different sizes.
One of the brittle stars.
What did I say about entertaining oneself at sea? Coloring cups, lining up seastars, spinning in chairs... What can I say? One gets a wee bit restless. I'm trying really hard to convince someone else to battle me in a Gumby suit putting-on contest so I can make a video.
A sideways shot of St. Paul Island where we saw fur seals, orcas, and lots of birds.
We dropped Wes Strasburger off there, and they used this boat to get him off the ship and to the island. Looks a bit scary!
Bird observers Brian Hoover and Sarah Jennings in the "bridge" which is the top of the boat where the captain guides the ship (or whoever is on watch). When we went past St. Paul Islands in the Pribilofs there were a lot more birds. I saw lots of thick-billed murres (which look just like penguins - black and white) - aka tubby moos, horned and tufted puffins, auklets (aka flying avocados), a lapland longspur, and more.
Here are the colored cups, all ready to go to the bottom of the Bering Sea!