Mary Phillips, Teacher In The Field
Wed, 23 Jul 2003

Beginning transit home

Our data collection phase about the geology of the Hess Deep is complete, although not as successfully as we had hoped. Wednesday's schedule called for the retrieval of the last five OBSs, but only three were actually spotted, returned, cleaned, and disassembled onboard ship. Despite every effort from Ben, Yosio, and the other chief scientists, the watchstanders on duty, namely Alejandro and myself, and with intricate navigational work from the bridge, OBS's numbered 13, 15, and 16 failed to surface or were unable to be spotted from the ship. The glare on the water during the midafternoon may have hampered our sighting efforts, but we continued to radio to the OBS units and/or wait for their backup release systems to automatically trigger until we could wait no longer and had to begin our transit back.

Some data has been lost, of course, and the reasons for emergence failure may never be completely known. Three additional OBS units, retrieved earlier, also returned limited data results, in one case because of a battery failure. Many other variables may be implicated in the other two, with an erratically operating disk drive being one possibility.

While the scientists will continue to download and process data during the transit back, there is a distinctly more relaxed atmosphere on board. For the first time, I got to sleep without an alarm waking me. In fact, I was still snuggled under my navy comforter reading an old 1976 Dick Francis novel when Astrid, my cabinmate, climbed down from her upper berth to head for the shower at 9AM.

Breakfast was long over by 9:30AM, but there was still cereal, bread, fruit, cracker snacks, and other goodies found on the stainless steel bar that filled the port side of the mess. After finishing the novel over a cup of tea, I headed up to the flying bridge to see what might be stirring in the ocean waters today. Mari, the lead mammal observer, had reported over her equally late breakfast that the mate on the bridge had spotted a whale surfacing several kilometers from the ship earlier in the morning.

At present the Ewing is about 400 nautical miles northwest of the Galapagos Islands, heading east at a cruising speed of about 11.8 knotsthat enables it to cover about 260 nautical miles daily. As we get closer and closer to any landforms, we may spot more life. And in just the short 45 minutes before lunch, we did: frigate birds in the distance flying and diving on the starboard side, and then two much smaller birds, probably storm petrels, dipping and rising from the waters portside. We have only traveled about 230 nautical miles or 426 kilometers from the Hess Deep but are already seeing changes in the life around us.