We spent much of the day today in transit to our next dredge location. This allowed us some much needed time to catch up on cataloguing the rocks from previous dredging, and package them away, to clear space for more dredges. Our pinger, which tells us the depth from the dredge to the bottom, is still broken, so we (the Chief-Scientists) have only experience, to tell us how much cable to feed out in order to have the dredge travel nicely along the bottom, without leaving coils of cable on the ocean’s floor. Speculating on what might be wrong with the pinger has become a favorite pastime aboard the boat, and explanations ranging from voodoo to random sounds in the ocean deactivating the pinger have been offered up, however it does not seem as though any real solution will present themselves.

There has also been much debate lately, on the time of day, and actually which day is when. The ship uses several times, one being universal GMT, which is the time in England, along the Prime Meridian, that is used for most of the scientific records. We also use local Samoan time for shift changes and meal hours, however many clocks aboard are still set to Hawaiian time, which is where the ship is based, and still further many computers are in either pacific or east coast time, or are partway through the conversion into local time. For instance, since our current time zone does not have daylight savings time, people who adjusted the time on their computers at the beginning of the trip are now off by an hour, because their computers still think they have to compensate for daylight savings time.

One of the more confusing applications of this mix-up, is in this daily report, since people have varying shifts, it is hard to figure out if “today is your day for the report”, means that it is actually today, or tomorrow morning, or, that it was supposed to be done last night. For occasionally, no reports are done in a day, and then the next day, one is done at 1 am (local time, I think) and another is done in the evening (this is the kind of vague term that confuses us). However, rarely is a single report done on its own individual day.

Ryan Delaney onboard the R/V Kilo Moana.