An Adventure a Day...: Danger on the High Seas

It has been almost a week since I last updated this blog. I am so sorry, but it has been a crazy week! We’ve faced storms, pirates and explosions aboard the Kilo Moana.

Jennifer and I in the engine room

My story picks up on last Saturday night. Jennifer and I had made friends with the engineers who take the 8pm to midnight shift, named Ken and Darrell. It was getting to be later at night, but we wanted to have an adventure, so we asked to get a tour of the engine room… actually it’s engine roomS. There are 14 different compartments that access different parts of the engine and other equipment to keep up alive out here. Each compartment is accessed a different way, so we were led all over the ship. Darrell took us on our first tour. We traversed through a maze or tunnels and tiny crawl spaces to get to several of the compartments. The deepest one was called shaft alley. The only thing in the room is a giant spinning shaft that is connected to the propellers on the outside of the ship. We were in the very bottom of the ship. Darrell definitely freaked us out by saying that if the connector between the shaft and the propeller malfunctioned and started to leak, we wouldn’t make it out of the compartment fast enough before it was completely flooded. Jennifer and I exited that room as quickly as possible! Then, Ken took us on a tour of the generator rooms and taught us how they make freshwater on the ship. This whole time I was worried that we might run out of water, but we can make an abundance of freshwater whenever we need to! We were able to get to 8 compartments before we realized how late it was. We decided to complete the rest of the tour on another day. Plus, we were starting to notice that the ship was rocking a lot more than usual.

Our engineering friend, Ken

Shaft Alley.

By the time I woke up in the morning, the cast had been cancelled due to rough weather. We figured we might be able to sample later in the day. We were wrong. We weren’t able to sample for two full days because the weather was terrible! The swells were swamping the bow, which usually sits 35 feet above the surface of the water! All of us sat in the lounge for hours watching the waves attack the boat and leave bubbly smears across the windows. It was amazing to see the awesome power of a pacific storm. Apparently there was a category 2 hurricane somewhere nearby and these waves were probably a remnant of its passing. At first, I was excited about having a few days off because I desperately need to finish some applications for summer programs. I soon discovered that it is nigh on impossible to focus on writing essays when the ship is rocking and rolling. Imagine trying to write a paper and every few moments someone comes up behind you and violently shakes your chair and sends your computer sliding across the desk. Eventually, I gave up and joined the wave-watching party. Some of the other girls and I slept in the lounge for those two days because it was much calmer in there than in our rooms. Plus, I couldn’t help but think that I would fall out of my top bunk every time I tried to sleep in it. Everyone was bored out of their minds because there wasn’t anything to do. No samples mean filtering was impossible. It was even difficult to read without feeling funny. We ended up watching movie after movie. The good thing was that we all bonded while we were stuck in the lounge for hours at a time.

Finally, the seas calmed down enough for us to take samples and the day turned out to be bright and beautiful. After so many days inside, it was glorious to breathe in some fresh air. We hadn’t been allowed up on deck in a couple of days and it was so nice be in the sunshine. Jennifer, Sam and I went to the bow and spent hours in the sunshine and leaning over the edge to get our faces splashed by the salty spray. I felt so alive! I couldn’t bear being inside for any longer and ended up staying outside almost the entire day. We had a lot of fun jump-roping on deck in the early afternoon. At first, my aim was to get some exercise in, but it soon turned into a trip down memory lane as Jennifer, Sam and I took turns turning the rope and jumping in and out of the circle, singing familiar jump rope songs from our childhood. It’s the simple things in life.

Now that the weather was calmer, the lead scientists aimed to continue taking samples for the different experiments. Unfortunately, Murphy’s Law came into effect and we kept getting delayed. First it was the storm. Then, we overshot the temperature range. We needed to collect samples at 18 degrees Celsius but somehow we passed that mark in the middle of the night while we were heading north. We decided to wait and collect those samples on our way back south. However, we were getting samples from 10 degrees Celsius when we started to smell something strange. Turns out, the centrifuge in the Rad Van (a separate little building on the upper deck where all experiments using radiation take places) had exploded! We thought it was dead and someone’s experiment was ruined. The science engineers were able to fix it, but someone connected it back to the power incorrectly. The very next day we smelled the same strange smell. The centrifuge had been overloaded with power and had burnt out, along with much of the other equipment in the Rad Van. The temperature shift experiments were delayed again because the incubators were fried. Today, we finally began those experiments again and everything is back on track.

Remember when we had 80’s day last week? Well, another theme day has passed. Shiver Me Timbers! It was Pirate Day aboard the Kilo Moana! There isn’t much explaining to do about this day, so I’ll just let the pictures do the talking. Arrrrrg!