Another day, another bout of nausea, another look at the weather to see if we can unload some of honking big pieces of science sitting on the back deck.

Yeah, yeah, I’m through the worst of it, but even with meds (now trying my third), the nausea still isn’t going away enough for regular meals every day. And if living on bananas and saltines isn’t bad enough, something about this environment has completely clobbered my sense of smell. The only scents that seem to get through are sour milk, uric acid, hydraulic oil and Lysol. Which, as you can imagine, only heighten the appeal of any gustatory experience.

But I’m functional enough to get stuff done, mostly, and on my feet enough to appreciate the wonders of being at sea. And the nausea comes and goes, playing to the ongoing cognitive dissonance in my head. Devon pointed out that in my last email to her I wrote, in almost consecutive sentences “I’m just going to deal with [the nausea], get through this cruise and never go to sea again,” and “Next time I’m going to have to bring about four times as much hot sauce.” Go figure.

At the moment we’re waiting for the seas to calm enough for us to deploy SUMO2 (surface mooring 2), the honking big piece of science at center stage on the back deck. It’s one of four moorings we’re deploying this cruise, and the only one that has any actual bits above water. The other three all take undersea measurements that get relayed to SUMO by gliders and magic. I’ll write more about them when the time comes, but for now, we’re mostly biding our time.

Biding time on the ship consists of New York TImes crossword puzzles, shooting the breeze, and going over, once again, how everything is going to go down when it’s time to go.

I was going to take some time to write about things like a tour of the ship, and an introduction to the crew, but I realized I did all that last year, and not much has changed since then. So have a look at these old posts, get rid of the penguins and ice, and replace them in your mind with big, vertigo-inducing waves.

– A Bit About The Ship
– Under the Hood
– Captains, Mates, Engineers and All That