Oh, right – the storm. Played out about as the crew said it would: we rocked a little more than usual (though “usual” is always hard to quantify on an unfamiliar ride), but I forgot about it and spent the day coding and talking with shipmates. Didn’t remember until I popped up to the bridge mid-afternoon to find blue skies all around – wasn’t there supposed to have been a storm at some point? Woody showed me the ship’s track on windy.com – yeah, apparently there had been. Ish. Great bout of rain and a confused sea, but that was all behind us now.

We’re around 50N, 152W now, roughly 700 miles to go until Seward. Two, three days and we’re done. A few of us were up late – late for me – in the ship’s lounge/library last night, passing a guitar back and forth, trying to find songs we knew in common. Then off to our respective bunks to tuck in and drift off to sleep to the ship’s nightly lullaby.

I’ve been meaning to write about that, actually. First few nights I wasn’t sure I wasn’t imagining it, but out here, rolling side to side, the ship plays us a tune each night. It plays throughout the day, too, but it’s easy to miss when we’re all rushing about with our work. At night though, with your ear to the hull, it’s always there: two slow notes, back and forth, like a bow drawn across a cello, as we list port to starboard and back again. Occasionally a third, much lower, felt rather than heard. I got my guitar tuner out and it told me the ship was playing A#2 and F#2, roughly 116Hz and 92Hz, remarkably on key.

It’s impossible to miss once you’ve noticed it, and you find yourself waiting for that last low note to resolve the triad.

At first I assumed it was localized, some piece of equipment shifting behind a bulkhead nearby.  But you hear it everywhere. It seems loudest on the subdeck, right at the bow, where the hull cuts the water. It is the hull somehow, the ship itself, resonating, singing. Hard to capture down there, what with everything else clanking around, but at night, in your bunk, it’s all you hear – A#-F#-A#-F#…

This morning, rolling along as ever. We’ve lost some of that push from the sea – making about 10 knots on average – but none of the left-right-left-right. We’ve gotten used to whiteboards that levitate out from under our pen, and the occasional herd migration of unsecured chairs sliding back and forth around the forward part of the lab.

But onward the ship carries us, north to Seward, singing as she goes.