April 1st, 2022. During our long transit across the Pacific Ocean there have been a few exciting moments on the ship relating to our path. From Hawaii to the Kingdom of Tonga, the ship crossed over the International Date Line, as well as crossing over the Equator. This ties into sailing traditions of sailor tattoos, earning tattoos representative of the achievements in their career. For instance, when one crosses the Equator, a sailor now earns the right to wear a shellback tattoo. During this cruise the science party is ticking off a few of these achievements: crossing the Internal Date Line earns the golden dragon, sailing to Hawaii (on the way back) earns a hula girl, and a swallow is earned for every 5,000 miles sailed. Many of us have talked about getting some of these when we get back to commemorate this long expedition.
The science party participated in another sailing tradition, or ritual, when crossing over the Equator. To earn the shellback title, graduating from a pollywog, there’s typically a crossing event that takes place. These events can be fairly traumatic and are more like hazing events. Crew members being taken from their berthing rooms, food waste dumped on them, or physically abused. We did not do this, instead, we did a voluntary ceremony to be cleansed with “equator water”. No hazing here. We filled up a bucket for each scientist, with some members of the Jason and Sentry parties joining, lined up against the side of the ship, and baptized ourselves under King Neptune. As we dumped the water, we were welcomed across the boundary separating the North and the South, granting access to the Southern Hemisphere. After the ceremony we received certificates noting the time and place we crossed, 167 25.0 West on March 28th, and our place of respect within the realm of Neptunus Rex. It was a bonding moment for the family of scientists, taking lots of photos and videos of the event. To the right is a lab group photo, it was all of our first times sailing across the Equator.
The day before, we crossed the International Date Line on March 27th / March 28th where we only changed our time, not the day. We went back one hour but we were supposed to move forward a day, instead deciding to keep the day the same to avoid mix-ups in our continuous tracking of days and events at sea. This caused some confusion among the science party, as now when we are connected to the internet all our messages and notifications are coming from the future, telling us we posted in 20 hours, or our messages from yesterday, are actually today. Some of us entered a philosophical state, joking about the human constructs of time, entering a state of temporal limbo. It was nice to get an extra hour of sleep though! Time at sea already feels so different, none of us can remember what day of the week it is, and soon when sampling starts it will only get more difficult to keep track of time. We will all be on different ROV Jason watches, 6 4-hour shifts for round the clock science as well as having separate responsibilities to be available for the different instruments. This will inevitably set us all on different sleeping schedules, and time will become meaningless to us. It doesn’t help that while we are all coordinating with “ship time”, the ROV Jason operates under UTC time. Today we’ll be finally reaching our first site, Kilo Moana. We’ve been split into our respective teams of dissecting and microscopy, to divide and conquer all the snails we will be collecting for this grant. Now all the instrumentation we brought will be put to the test and after 10 days of transit, we’re ready to start the science.