Like all things in summer, my time out at sea was a time warp. At times when boredom and loneliness sets in, there’s nothing out there except for the cloud-filled skies and windmills. However, in the past few days, as I have gotten to know my shipmates more and as I have spent more times in the sunshine (tanning, yes!), time accelerates.
Prior to working (and after working out in the “gym”), I have spent many of my afternoons lying out on the bow. A few days ago, I learned about a type of bioluminescent algae present in the North Sea, which at night sometimes twinkles with a seafoam green and at other times looks like a giant fungus infection. The Swedes call the bioluminescent type “Mareld” and it creates awesome and organically swirling patterns. One of the Brits on board looked out the window yesterday and mistook it for land. Oops. Not quite.
Down time is created when sometimes the ROV has problems or when we need to excavate a site very thoroughly. When this picture was taken, the ROV needed a few repairs on the electromagnetic surveying equipment. By the way, almost every day we get to experience sunsets like this.
Last time I talked about how few stars I see on the North Sea. Forget what I said. There is a small window between 12-2 when the sky is almost completely black. Once your eyes adjust to the darkness and after staring at the sky for 2 minutes, the stars slowly and timidly emerge. I could spend hours looking at the sky, but I suppose I have only 2 hours to do so. And I also should be working.
And, lastly, it was my birthday two days ago! My boatmates surprised me by this wonderful decoration at my deskspace… In case you were wondering, Franklin carries flags of almost all nations, since they are required to fly the flag of the nation’s waters that they are currently in. In the meantime, one of the crew members (a Swede) hangs the American flag in his cabin. In his free time he likes to shoot jellyfish with pellet guns.
The chef also made me a beautiful birthday cake called a Rolltarte. It was a vanilla cake with cream filling and lots of summer berries. Due to a plethora of food photos on the web, I am anti-food-photos. Apologies. However, it was an amazing cake and I am very grateful to the chef and his assistant. If only they could bake desserts for me all the time…
If you were wondering what the drinking policy for birthdays on board is like… well… you can’t drink unless you are in port. On pizza night and barbecue night, the chef occasionally breaks out a case or two of Beck’s non-alcoholic beer (0.3% by volume). It was an engineer’s birthday yesterday and he woke up to drink an alcoholic beer (He starts work at 6pm). Oof. He calculated that it would take 20 non-alcoholic beers to equal an average beer back in his hometown of Aberdeen, Scotland. He then went on to say that 20 non-alcoholic Beck’s would not be worth it at all.