Life at Sea – Part 1
I wrote these updates while I was at sea, but since I had no internet access, I wasn’t able to post them at the time. The next few posts record tidbits during the course of my 6 weeks on my life on board a vessel.
March 26th- 27th
Parting Shot- No land again for 6 weeks!!
I will refer to these as the lost days. Days that I spent mostly horizontal feeling very sorry for myself. Days when just the slightest whiff from the kitchen made me feel like hurling myself off the side. Days where I was subsisting on mainly bread and yoghurt and the mere thought of going to eat would upset me. Days when I really wondered what I had gotten myself into…..
You may be thinking but heyyyyyy you got to eat Chinese food everyday! Awesome! Welllll let me stop you right there. I was to learn very quickly that everyday Chinese food is not what we know and love as Chinese food. Let’s not even get into the mystery meat that would make an appearance ever so often. There was a struggle. Once we hit the open ocean, I think my body had too much to adapt to at once and started to rebel, which as you can imagine did not end pleasantly for me. I think the change in food, even more so than seasickness itself was causing me to feel ill. At first I thought hmmm maybe I’ll lose weight on this diet. That soon changed to hmm maybe I’ll get hypertension instead (the food sometimes tended to be a little salty to my may taste- very salty at times actually) . Then there was even hmm…. I might just waste away and die! Luckily, the latter option did not come to pass. I may in fact have to check out that hypertension thing though. I had been to sea before so I expected my sea legs to return more quickly than they did, but I really think the food was a major contributor to my discomfort.
Despite feeling very yucky, I still had to press on and attend several saftey training sessions that were conducted while we were on our way out to the working area. Not much fun considering I didn’t really understand what was being said anyway, but I went through the motions and just followed what everyone else was doing.
| Feeling Yucky….. |
March 28th
I spent a pleasant morning in the bridge with the officers. The 2nd officer allowed me to sit in his chair and offered me biscuits. More specifically some biscuits for me to have when I didn’t feel like eating much. The 1st officer speaks English and so he was able to be translator.
I had been under the impression that i would have to handwash my clothes during the journey (no-one had informed me otherwise). Turns out there is in fact a laundry room with washing machines! So you know who jumped on that.
March 29th
If I ever do something like this again I will know exactly how to stock up. I thought I was prepared in that regard, but I was so wrong. I even resisted buying comfort foods in the supermarket in Mauritius as I was dreaming of the summer body I’d been working on. I revelled in how disciplined I was being, but I should have just yielded. I reallly should have. I discounted how terribly I’d be feeling at some points during the first few days.
Despite the language barrier I feel like some of the officers have taken me on as some kind of pet. Speaking of which, we have a cat onboard and the crew is very fond of it. I think it made its way onto the ship in Mauritius. Little did it know that it had an ocean adventure ahead of it!
It is beginning to get colder up on deck now. We are certainly not in the tropics anymore.
One of the officers had said I should come up to the bridge sometime when they try to do some fishing. I’m actually looking forward to that. I wonder if we can catch a tuna or something!
It is Sunday, so we got an extra dish at dinner as well as a soda! (We don’t usually get drinks with our meals). I skipped the extra dish; it looked a little suspect to me and it turns out I was right!! It was actually kidneys (of what animal I have no idea and no desire to find out.)
Another Sunday treat was a round of karaoke!!! We sang a few songs and I was even given some beer to wash down a bag of raisins I was gifted. That was fun.
March 30th
Did my first full shift today. manning and recording info from 3 sets of equipment half- hourly. I have to do one shift of this every day regardless of what else is going on, or what else I have to participate in. Since the women (of which there are 5) are not usually involved so much in the physical aspects of deploying equipment, we are tasked with divvying up this monitoring work.
| One of the monitoring stations |
I’m wondering if the chefs are beginning to notice my on and off struggle with the food. There was one evening when mystery meat was on the menu and they came to my rescue with some luncheon meat without my even asking. In fact at the next meal. one just grabbed my bowl and plunked the spam-esque meat down before I could even ask what was on the original menu.
One of my officer friends, was quick to point out my unhealthy eating habits this evening. I had noticed that nobody else drank anything with their meals. I tried to do same, but there were times when I absolutely had to have water during the meal else I feared the salt draw all the water from my body leaving me a withered husk… or simply just to wash things down. The Chinese do no such thing apparently,.and he explained to me that that was in part what the soup, which was indeed a part of all our meals, was for.
March 31st
The weather conditions have deteriorated. It is way too windy for any deployments. These waves are no joke. We’re kinda just rolling around trying to avoid a storm that’s in the area. I was afraid I was going to fall out of bed at one point last night.
April 1st
Some of us had a little party of sorts last night. My bunk mate Hang, the French Girl and one other guy had birthdays this week, so we had a little thing in our common room for them. Most of the conversation was in Mandarin, but Tiphaine and I got translations ever so often. There were several extra dishes outside the regular meal allotment. There were even brownies and the captain sent some ice cream! There were also other random gifts. For instance, the chief scientist sent a whole fish, which the 2nd officer prepared. We had fruit juices and even wine, which was a nice change from the usual fare.
| Party!! |
