by By Bishesh Shah: Environmental Engineering, Cornell University
Editor’s Note: This is a delayed post from earlier in the cruise… transport yourself back in time!
Today felt extra long. Since we got an extra hour and entered a new time zone! We really are on our way to Alaska. With that extra hour of sleep, I ended up waking up super early and making it to the first breakfast time (7:10). Afterwards, I met up with Josh (the Communication Technician) and Kyle. We started up a new project and worked on the hand radios used for intracommunication on the ship. For some of the radios, we needed to replace the battery and for others we needed to reprogram them. At 9 am, the whole group met up for our morning meetings and discussed the plan for the day.
Today was used for our research project and we had constant check-ins to see what everyone was working on. Grace, Victoria, and I are focusing on the relationship between wind speed/direction and fuel consumption. To collect our data, we asked TR (an SSSG) for some help. He helped us get in contact with Brian (the first engineer) and he gave us the graphs of fuel consumption (gallons per hour) and time (see below). Victoria had been using wind speed for her previous project idea and was easily able to make the graphs of wind speed vs time which we needed. We also established the layout for our project. One sheet will be the graphs of fuel consumption vs time and wind speed vs time next at different times: one instance of strong winds, one instance of mild winds, and one instance of calm winds. The other sheet of paper will be the trends and our findings.
After lunch, we all came back and continued working on our mission badges. Shannon introduced this idea to the group, inspired by the mission patches created for NASA missions. We nominated Jen to be our group leader and she led a brainstorming session to brew ideas. With all the ideas mentioned, Drago made a Google form for us to all fill out and vote on the theme or what we want on the patch. Afterwards, Abrian led a workshop about making zines (short magazines). The theme was things we were good at or topics we had a lot of knowledge on. Everyone had a blast writing from a wide array of topics from the Beatles to How to be a New Yorker (my personal favorite).
By then it was dinner time and we ended the night by all chatting and watching a movie in the theater room. Good night from me and stay tuned for more stories from the sea!
