Third mate was talking about it with one of the engineers when I came in. “Yeah, next week we’re gonna be laughing about this: ‘Remember that one transit that really sucked?'”

The sea change was obvious yesterday morning. The sky flat, the sea an uneasy gunmetal gray. We’d pushed through to the center of the North Pacific Gyre and were now feeling its other edge, where warm water from the Kuroshio current, coming up from Japan, finds itself face to face with the colder current circling down from Alaska in the other direction. Sometimes the two play well, sometimes they don’t. 

This time, it sounds like they’re both feeling a bit surly. Mind you, it’s nothing that this ship hasn’t seen a hundred times. But as the crew reminds us, Sikuliaq was built for going through ice, so she’s pointy in front, but smooth and round on the bottom. That means when she’s out in open ocean, she’s got the stability of a bath toy and rolls like…like something that rolls a lot. A quartering wind or swell means she’s going to shimmy, bob and weave along like a drunk line-dancing cowgirl making her way back to the bar.

30 degree swings (15-16 each side) with an 11-second period – makes for a “sporty” ride on deck!

The temperatures have dropped accordingly, so we’ve traded out our shorts and Hawaiian shirts for fleece, woolies and beanie caps, and the “picnic deck” out back has been – more often than not – abandoned. But as the song goes, it’s still warm below, and quite a show. We’re taking our turns giving talks about whatever we know about – open source signal intelligence, 3D printing, subsea cables or mooring ops. Allana, Evan and Robin in the galley are giving us our 3+ squares, pulling the stops out with gloriously-prepared rack of lamb, scallops, risotto and desserts that…well, we’re all going to either need to substantially step up our workouts or look into slightly larger pant sizes.

But the storm. It’s a doozy, but thanks to the wonders of NOAA, we know where it is and how it’s moving, so captain is aiming to slide us up the lee side, where we’ll have both wind and water at our tail. It’ll be a bit of a ride, but we’ll be surfing the swell, so there’s now talk of us making Seward a day early.

Somehow we slipped past hump day without anyone noticing it. Ten days is an odd length for a cruise, I’m realizing. Normally at this point, six days in, we’d be finally getting our legs under us, reaching our stride and settling into the patterns that would keep us going for the remainder of our month or so at sea. Still, in the vernacular, “singing our outbound songs.” Instead, we’re all already talking about what we’ve got planned for “after.”

But first, the storm.