Wow.  The last thing I remember from last night, I was crawling into my bunk, absolutely exhausted, around 0330.  Today I woke up terribly confused at 0930, convinced we must have passed through some sort of time warp since no one woke me up for breakfast around 0620-0700.  On one hand, I guess I missed Gina’s waffles, but on the other, since I managed to sleep through 10 or 20 people setting up breakfast, eating it, and cleaning up less than ten feet away from me, maybe (just maybe) I was a little bit tired.  I’m off watch until 1300, so I have a little while to write, clean my bunk and deal with the remnants of my laundry debacle.

I did a lot of laundry on my day off, washing my clothes in a bucket of salt water and scrubbing them by hand—they were absolutely filthy and the water kept coming out gray/brown even after two buckets.  Unfortunately, someone told me (and Saphra—group laundry is more fun) that we weren’t allowed to use fresh water to rinse, so when we hung them out, our clothes stayed wet all evening and had to be taken down at night and put up again yesterday morning.  After clothes soaked with seawater sit in a trash bag for six hours, they smell TERRIBLE, far worse than the ocean at low tide ever could and certainly worse than they did when we started.  After talking to some of the other crew, we found out that we could indeed rinse our clothes in a small amount of fresh water and actually we had to, or else they would never dry.  So for the second time, we gathered up all our (now stinky) laundry, got a small bucket of fresh water, rinsed it out as best we could, wrung it out and hung it up.  Luckily Dani suggested adding a little bit of vinegar instead of bleach to the water to help get the smell out without eating away at our clothes—it mostly worked but I’m still trying to dry two pairs of jeans, a pair of shorts and some socks, and every once in a while in my bunk I’ll get a whiff of my nasty laundry.  I suspect some of it will stay salty, smelly and terrible until I find a big washing machine and a lot of detergent.

On a much better note, I’m surprised so far with the amount of ocean life we’re able to observe from the deck.  The first time dolphins came to swim right at the bow and we could see them several feet down in the water I felt like I must be in a really good aquarium, but then I realized: this isn’t an aquarium—this is the real thing! Besides the frequent whale and dolphin sightings, (I’ve seen at least three sperm whales so far), other people have seen sea turtles and tuna nearby as well.  At night, birds I can’t recognize come to fly around the boat and dash through the lights at the stern.  They’re very mysterious.  The birds make strange squeaking noises when flying and when we first headed offshore we thought that they were bats, coming from land to fly erratically around the lights catching insects, but there aren’t any insects around here for them to eat and we can see them just enough to see a bird head and wing shape.  (At night, there are no lights on deck, because they drain the batteries significantly and ruin night vision, making it harder to see anything that isn’t lit up, like other ships, or sails up above the lights) The birds seem to vanish entirely in the daytime, but maybe sometime I’ll be able to see them better around dusk or dawn.

Time to wrap up- this is getting a little long. Tomorrow I’m off from 0700-1900 so hopefully I’ll have time to write a bit more.

Logan

P.S. to the Clarkson Family: Ben says he is very busy but will write soon. 

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