Bering Sea: Day 19 4th of July

Yesterday we had a barbecue on the back deck for the 4th of July, only what that meant is that the cook grilled meat out there but we still ate inside. It smelled realllllly good out there (and they did also grill sustainable Alaska salmon), and the funniest thing happened. There is a camera on the back deck that shows what is going on outside, so you can watch the MOCNESS or whatever is happening on the back deck from inside the ship, from various spots. Well someone focused the camera on the grill and everyone gathered around in the lab watching The RV Thompson Cooking Show. Ha! It was pretty funny. I so wish I got a picture of everyone standing there watching, but alas I didn't.

After several days where the sea was smooth as glass, we are starting to see swells again, BUT... the sun came out!!! It is so incredibly gorgeous. I ran outside yesterday when I first saw it even just for an hour, and said, "What's that flaming ball of fire in the sky?!" Today it came out for hours, but I learned something from the Captain: The fog and the wind don't like eachother. So when it's grey and you can't differentiate sea from sky the ride is smoother. When it's sunny, the wind picks up. So there ya go - you learn something new every day. Here are a few pics from yesterday.

Casey holds a handheld flare in our "4th of July pyrotechnics demonstration."
Second Mate Eric Haroldson sets off a flare (he's the one from Gumby Contest #2).
And then the flare goes in a bucket, where it continues to smoke and dance around.
Capt John and Third Mate Dave look at the mess they have to clean up!
Doesn't the Multi-Core look pretty in this light? It was actually at or after sunset, and it was grey but the lighting in photos made the sky bluish.
Yesterday I spent time talking to Alexei Pinchuk, a marine biologist who works at University of Alaska-Fairbanks in Seward, about his cool work on zooplankton (don't tune out - go look at the photos from the other day's blog!). He mostly works on krill and on copepods and amphipods, which are medium to large crustaceous (is that a word?) zooplankton.
He incubates krill from eggs in... a refrigerator! Ha. I think that's so funny. Normally you think of heat lamps when you think of incubators, but since they live in such cold seawater, the fridge does the trick.
Alexei is orginally from Russia (St. Petersburg) and he works nights so I hadn't had as much chance to talk to him so I really enjoyed seeing his pics from Russia, and talking and seeing him do his thing. He deploys the MOCNESS at night. This is Lorelei, an undergrad, and Alexei getting set up.
Here they are about to put it in the water.
After retrieving it back on board, they spray down the MOCNESS net mesh into the "codends" (at the end of the nets). Here, Alexei is pouring the goodies - zooplankton - into smaller containers.
They caught a jellyfish in the MOCNESS last night! This one was a Sea Nettle (Chrysaora sp.) rather than a Lion's Mane we got earlier on the trip.
These copepods fluoresced blue when you shook the codend! The pic is totally out of focus but you can see the glowing inside the codend.

Bering Sea Day 19: Independence Day

Wildflowers in central Texas. Copyright (c) Wendee Holtcamp

Today is America's Independence Day, and I love my country, and this was my favorite holiday when I was a kid. I always spent it with my dad, and sometimes we'd watch the fireworks over the Columbia River on the border of Washington and Oregon. It was exciting because it was close to my birthday. But I was thinking today that my real Independence Day came the day I accepted God's free gift of grace and the love of Jesus, the day my sins were forgiven for all time. I wrote this a few months ago and just thought I'd share:

Atheists (and I used to be one of them) upset by the injustice caused in the name of religion come to the wrong conclusion (that God doesn't exist). God is love. Does love exist? God is that which is pure, unadulterated joy. God is truth. God is holy. Do you see pure beauty in life, rare as it may be? That's God at work.

[W]hatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Philippians 4:8

In all religions, we humans have a tendency to not act like God. We have a tendency to not tell the truth, to steal someone else's joy and not feel it ourselves, to act ugly, to not be pure. That's just the plain facts. In Christianity, we believe that the God of love came here to Earth to teach us and ultimately reconcile our crappy nature with his holy self. He forgave all our crappiness. Love covered it. He smothers us in his love! Like a dumptruck. We're free, we're a dead man walking that got parole, who got off free and clear with the exchange of our soul - but we're giving our soul to a life of love, of our best effort at love. There's a bonus. The real Holy Spirit of God will enter in, we can access its power to live this life!

This song says it all and makes me cry every time I hear it... this is Pocket Full of Rocks singing Come as You Are.

"Come as You Are."

He's not mad at you
He's not disappointed
His grace is greater still,
than all of your wrong choices
He is full of mercy and he is ever kind
Hear his invitation, His arms are open wide

You can come as you are,
with all your broken pieces
And all your shameful scars
The pain you hold in your heart,
bring it all to Jesus
You can come as you are

Louder than the voice that whispers you're unworthy
Hear the sound of love,
that tells a different story
Shattering your darkness and pushing through the lies
How tenderly he calls you,
His arms are open wide

You can come as you are,
with all your broken pieces
And all your shameful scars
The pain you hold in your heart,
bring it all to Jesus
You can come as you are

You can come as you are

You can come as you are with all your broken pieces
And all your shameful scars
The pain you hold in your heart,
bring it all to Jesus
You can come as you are