Day 3&4

Things are going great out here. Yesterday we made landfall at Tern Island (part of French Frigate Shoals Atoll) where we offloaded three people and some supplies. One of them was a Fish and Wildlife volunteer who was to be spending 4 months there doing bird stuff, and two were NOAA employees who were on a shark culling mission to eliminate a few specific sharks that have been eating the endangered monk seal pups.. The island itself just started out as a sandbar, but during WWII the military built up the island with coral they blasted from the reef in order to build a runway on it. It is a very small island with a few barracks on it, and of course an old runway.

Millions of seabirds call the runway home, so any plane landing must do several low flybys before they land in order to scare off all the birds. When we arrived, the wind was blowing 20 knots, and the little island looked very barren and bleak. The fish and wildlife boat came out to meet us (we came into the shallows as far as we could before our 15 foot draft limited us)... The folks on the boat looked a little bedraggled and had a crazy shipwrecked look in their eye... Tern Island is the only outpost of civilization before you reach midway, ~700 miles northwest. There are other islands (called motus) that make up French Frigate shoals atoll. Most of them are just sand-spits, but there is one remnant of volcanic rock called La Perousse pinnacle that still remains of the high island that has now sunk into the ocean. See picture. We will be returning to French Frigate shoals on one of our later cruises to do debris removal, but for now we've begun steaming our way northwest to Laysan Island. I'm part of the crew that will be removing nets and debris from the beach at Laysan, so I'll have to break out my quarantined set of clothing in order to land on the island. I'm looking forward to seeing the endemic Laysan Finch and the Laysan duck (only 600 left in the world), both found nowhere else in the world but this tiny island. There is a freshwater/brackish "lake" in the middle of Laysan that seems to provide great habitat for birds....

This morning it was my duty to assist with a CTD operation aboard the ship.. This is an oceanographic operation during which we drop a big apparatus with various instruments attached down to 500 meters, where we then take conductivity measurements (determines salinity), Temperature readings, and collects water samples. We winch the apparatus over the side using a deck-mounted crane, and then lower it on a cable to the required depth. My duty was to guide the thing up and over the side, as it is swinging around on the cable in the rocking seas. It is bigger than I am and weighs way more than I do, so it was kind of hard to control, but we managed to seal the deal. I then had to relay the angle of the cable to the crane operator as he lowered it down to depth to avoid drift and damage to the underside of the ship. Anyway, today we start gearing up for land operations ashore.