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Today marks six days since we first stepped foot on the R/V Atlantis. I thought that by this point, I would have explored the ship sufficiently enough to have a solid understanding of what’s going on, but I find that I’m surprised by the Atlantis every day.
I went out to stargaze with Willow the other night. It was pretty unsuccessful–the full moon was directly overhead, so everything was too bright to clearly see the sky. As we’re talking on the bow, we hear an old bell ring. We had never heard bells being used on the ship before. Though there was a bell on deck in our line of sight, nobody was there–maybe it was someone ringing a different bell onboard as a signal to someone. Thirty seconds later we hear it again. Willow and I decide to go up to the bridge and ask what the bell is used for. To our surprise, the crew has no idea what we’re talking about. We headed back down to investigate the bell on deck. Maybe it was rung by the wind. While I’m trying to recreate the sound, we hear ringing again: this time, from a box on the meteorological tower sitting on the deck!
As we turned around to leave, the bell started ringing again. We returned and didn’t hear anything, but when we started leaving again, it rang. As we tried to open the box it rang, as we got close it rang, as we left it rang–it was creepy.
We made audio (sound clip courtesy of Megan Siwak) and video recordings to convince the bridge that we were not messing with them, and a crew member came down to the deck to investigate with us. There is a rusty ratchet strap holding the box closed, and after messing with it for a few minutes we were finally able to open it.
Inside was an old sound-powered phone. The source of the noise was a bell activated by a hand crank. We passed around the handheld. At first there was just the sound of the wind whistling, but then we heard a crackly song: “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” by Tiny Tim. After hearing that, we closed the box and called it quits for the night.
I’ll let you make up your own mind about what happened.
