Hey! Guess where I am? I’m living on a boat for a month!! For the last four weeks of the internship, Jaya and I sadly had to part ways. I will be stationed on MMT’s vessel Franklin for two surveys. Franklin is MMT’s largest vessel at a length of 55m and 12 m wide.
Image lifted from MMT
Before we can start our surveys, we first need to conduct quality assurance testing of the instruments and navigation system. Those will start tomorrow since today has seen horrendous weather.
Also had a familiarization meeting, or a meeting to talk about the goals, plan, and execution of the project. We may also have a muster drill (which is donning safety apparel and gathering outside in case we would ever have to board life rafts). As part of this plan, we got to don neoprene survival suits. I felt like gumby and it was a rather uncomfortable since you have a giant foam stram blocking everything except your face.
I am adjusting to walking around on a boat and breathing stale air, however I will not be able to establish a routine yet. Tomorrow, I would like to be awake for the beginning of testing, and then will start a night shift. This entails working from 16:00 in the afternoon until 4:00 in the morning.
I think I can adapt to life on board. Since I work the night shift, I am sharing a cabin with a hydrographer who works the day shift. This way, we will never have to interfere with sleep schedules.
And this is the lovely view from our window… Oh wait, it’s concrete! That’s right! We still haven’t departed from our dock at Esjberg, Denmark!
Nonetheless, I have had the opportunity to go running (twice!) around this Danish port city. We were even sent on a mission to buy a new computer monitor, which entailed walking into town, asking for a lot of directions, waiting for our boss to call us back with the store’s address, sitting in a coffeeshop, and then finally taking a taxi out of town to a remote shopping mall to buy this monitor. What an adventure.