Well! Christmas has been and gone. And what an enjoyable time it was too. Some strange mix of work Christmas do and a get together of an extended family. Nobody stormed off in a huff, the turkey wasn’t burned and as far as I know, nobody put their foot in it. If I did I haven’t been told about it yet!
Watching the sun set and moon rise late on Christmas eve
Christmas day started nice and sunny. Still suffering from a lack of fresh air after a few days of bad weather, I went out on deck all wrapped up in my foul weather gear and sat under a sky bright with sunshine. It surprised me a bit when water started dripping down my neck. It turns out that after a big storm all the windows need a good wash to get the salt off and one of the favorite tricks is to rinse these off without telling the scientists. The crew know to keep well clear….they know the work plan and work obviously stops for coffee. There is a little lip to the upper gangway that collects water which then empties on those ill informed or gullible enough to take up residence below. But the best bit is that it only happens when the sporadic, almost random, slightly larger than normal waves pass. The culprit can be long gone by this time. There are plenty of the gullible / ill informed like me because it is the only place out of the wind and in the sun.
Festivities started at 12:00 with a champagne reception followed by dinner at 13:00. Dress code was smart but you can get some very interesting versions of smart at sea. Jon had a tux with flip flops, I went for smart/casual, the boss when for shirt and tie with climbing trousers. The lassies spanned sparkly dresses and high heels (lethal on a ship) to t-shirts.
Dinner was an extensive and formal affair with a huge menu shown below. I had a bit of everything! Add to this a bottle of wine on the table and mixed seating (officers + engineers, crew, technicians and scientists) with place names. The galley staff / purser were stuck in the kitchen for this but they get a their own special dinner afterwards where service and clean up is undertaken by a couple of the officers and crew. I’m sure all would agree the meal was excellent. I just wish I had a bit more self control.
A light lunch
Dinner was necessarily followed by a promenade on deck to blast some fresh air into my lungs in a desperate attempt to find that hollow leg I had when I was 16 or, as a second best, to kick start digestion. It was topped by the coffee and mints. At least that was the idea. I had one mint and decided I was already too full to enjoy it. A BIG fat overfed tick to Christmas dinner then.
What other things does one do on Christmas day? mmmm watch TV and open presents! We must be a rather patient lot because we deferred the latter until 18:30. Instead we all squeezed into the video room as we did yesterday to watch a movie, this time “Elf”. You may have guessed but we were a little short of Christmas movies on the boat.
Presents started with a little gift from John our Chef. Everyone got a little something. I got one of those little foam airplanes. Others got a few sweets or incense sticks or similar. There is a surprising amount of fun to be had with the planes. Give them to a bunch of ROV pilots and they will be redistributing the weight to improve trim, making adjustments to flaps to improve flight characteristics and generally giving it as much care and attention to detail as might be lavished on the rather more costly ROV. It is just as much fun watching the rather unpredictable consequences. “there that should do it”… “oi! watch my coffee!” “move the nose weight aft a quater inch [some engineers seem to still work in imperial]” “you plonker…here give it to me!”
The night before we sailed we all went out for our last stable meal on shore and a few drinks. The Chileans do a mean hot chocolate that is 110% chocolate. Anyway one of the first topics of conversation as we all met up after various flights from our respective homes was how Christmas might work and what we would do. From that day developed a plan to rewrite the 12 days of Christmas for JC80 (James Cook cruise 80). Here is the outcome and it what we are all singing in the picture above. We are hoping that the PI will include this in the cruise report as one of the deliverable of the scientific project.
On the twelfth day of Christmas my PI gave to me [PI = Principle Investigator = boss]
Twelve Kiwa crawling [Kiwa = our vent crabs]
Eleven chimneys smoking
Ten ice burgs lurking
A force nine gale
Eight humpback whales
a seven armed starfish [one of the species found in greater abundance at the periphery of vents, a top predator in the system and unusual because the echinoderm group to which it belongs usually has 5 or multiples of 5 way symmetry.]
Six mini-niskens [the ROV mini-nisken rosette is a rack of 6, the big CDT has 24 but that does not fit so…]
Five meals a day [plus snacks and presents. Haribo is excluded as a meal]
Four CTDs
Three slip rings [slip rings = rotatable/spinning joints at the top equipment across which data can be transferred…,necessary to stop wire tangling]
Two clicks of wire [about how much wire we have managed to mangle on this trip…it usually happens through wear and tear from heavy use. = clicks = km]
and a brand new ROV [this is the ROVs first science cruise after a rebuild]
Festivities in action top left - Cathy drawing her secret Santa, bottom left - The 12 Days of Christmas JC80 Style, right - Santa supervising the present giving
From there it went to pass the parcel. Because we are big kids and very sensitive to being excluded from games we did the modern version of the game where there is a mini present in each layer and you are never out [not like it was in my day…one present at the centre and you tried not to be the one to open a layer…see that parcel fly]. In this modern game if you receive the parcel a second time you must pass the parcel to the next person on who has not opened a layer. I’m not sure this event was planned as far ahead as many of our others as the prizes included, amongst other things, a single chocolates with a balloon, a tube of cotton buds, a British Airways toothbrush, a hair brush and other equally random items.
Lastly we had a visit from secret Santa who had obviously been working so hard over the preceding Christmas eve that he had used up all blubber stores. The slim version of Santa oversaw the distribution of a gift from his sack. They fell into the recurring theme of either sweets or games/puzzles. Most of the evening was then spent challenging each other to the puzzles while eating the sweets.
…. and so Christmas day drew to a close.
I was one of five that made it to boxing day breakfast. We have been lucky because Christmas fell on a nice gap in the bad weather and we are now back up to bouncing around and generally having a bit of difficulty doing anything. I’m sure it is the weather that is the cause of all our impaired abilities. ho hum…another day of transit with the slosh of the roll compensation tanks. A kind of ever present perpetual whooshing and gurgling as water is pumped from one side of the ship to the other. It makes things better but I’m still trying to figure out how to eat when I have to hold both bowl and tumbler (too many live up to their names). Perhaps I ate enough at Christmas to see me through tonight!
Chris