OCTOBER 10

Temp: 29 F

Weather: Cloudy, 17 knot winds

The days are running together now. Learning that it snowed in the interior of Alaska made me realize just how far land and regular life are from my reality right now. Time is a challenge to keep track of here on the ship.

Follow the Healy's route and see more photos on this map.

Two days ago we set ship time back an hour to provide more daylight in the morning for mooring work. Then yesterday we did that again, now aligning us with Hawaii time. But none of the clocks have been changed, so I have to remember to subtract two hours. But also, everything is communicated in military time, so if it’s after noon, then you add 12 hours. Plus we record seabird observation data in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). And for that you add eight hours to Alaska Standard Time, or ten hours to Hawaii time.

The one thing that never changes is meal time. Breakfast is 0645-0700, lunch is 1100-1200, and dinner is 1700-1800. No one messes that up. We also have to log onto a computer twice per day for accountability. Every person has to check a box before breakfast and before dinner, so that if anyone were lost from the ship they’d have some idea when, and where to start looking. Apparently that happened once when the Healy was in Antarctica, before the accountability system was created.

The whalers in Barrow still have one strike left to use this whaling season, and right now is prime time while the bowheads gather for fall feeding. The marine mammal observer/community liaison on the ship (a native of Barrow) coordinates with the whalers to ensure that our scientific research does not disrupt their hunting activities. Today the whalers took a day off and gave us permission to enter their hunting zone, so we rearranged our schedule to do mooring deployment and conductivity-temperature-depth (CTD) sampling near shore.

With all of the time changes, I was birding by 0745 as the ship transited across Barrow Canyon toward Peard Bay. The birding today was very slow: a few Glaucous Gulls, a Pacific Loon, two Yellow-billed Loons, one Ross’s Gull, and some Black-legged Kittiwakes. But the big excitement was whales. Calm waters today made it easy to sight the blows of bowheads, followed by the large knobby blowhole breaking the surface. Unlike humpbacks or fin whales, bowheads have a very low profile in the water, making them more difficult to find among whitecaps. Today was a perfect day for finding them though, and we saw several passing through the canyon. These Arctic whales will eventually make their way across the Chukchi Sea toward Wrangel Island and the Chukotka coast in Russia before heading south through Bering Strait to spend the winter in the Bering Sea.

Melanie Smith, Landscape Ecologist, Audubon Alaska