OCTOBER 12

Temp: 28 F

Weather: Mostly sunny in the AM then cloudy and snowing

Overnight we transited east past Point Barrow into the Beaufort Sea. At 0630 I woke to a gentle pink and powder blue sunrise with a fingernail clipping moon hanging in the sky.

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

The seas were calm and the boat swayed soothingly, making it hard not to lie back down and be rocked right back to sleep. But instead, it was time for my morning routine: breakfast, gym, shower, and email.

By now I'm pretty used to life on the ship and the ship lingo. I sleep on a rack in my quarters, eat in a galley, and work from the bridge. Moving about the ship you go fore, aft, port, or starboard. And we get to use other fun words like Helo Deck, conex, focsle, and muster station. Drowsy from Dramamine, I took a nap after lunch time, and was awoken by alarms and announcements that flooding was discovered on the ship. "All non-essential personal should head to the Main Deck to assist." This snapped me awake and out of my bunk. Further announcements revealed that the flooding was in the refrigeration compartment, and that there was 2 inches of standing water. Soon after it was announced that the flooding had been controlled. Not long after that I learned that the ship was in training mode and none of that actually happened.

Today we pulled up a mooring from 140 meters depth. From the top down, this instrument consists of a stout large yellow buoy, a few feet across, then six pairs of smaller yellow balls which contain sensors, and finally a very heavy weight, maybe 1000 pounds. When released into the ocean, the small, round yellow sensors are vertically suspended in the water column, held up by the buoy but anchored by the weight. This particular instrument has been anchored here collecting data for a year, since the last October Healy cruise. When it's time for recovery, the mooring is detached from the anchor weight through a remote control that sends a signal through the water column. Once released, the buoy and sensors float to the surface to be retrieved by crewman in a small boat. Over the next couple days the data inside will be retrieved and then the mooring will be deployed again.

This afternoon we are running a line following the 152nd line of longitude, collecting conductivity-temperature-density (CTD) data every half an hour or so. Besides the small boat we deployed to pick up the mooring, signs of life on the water have been scarce. Our species listed topped out at four, and our bird count at five: one Ross's Gull, one Yellow-billed Loon, one Northern Fulmar, and two Glaucous Gulls. But signs of life on the ship are increasing. We're all getting to know each other better now, and it's a Friday night, so a few of us are sitting down to a game of Bananagrams somewhere out here in the Beaufort Sea.

Melanie Smith, Landscape Ecologist, Audubon Alaska