Float Decorating Party!

 R/V Revelle left Honolulu the day after Christmas. We spent December 23-26 loading the ship and preparing everything onboard. I knew the loading days would be busy, but I hadn’t realized for how unprepared I was for them physically after two weeks in a hotel room. We should have been training! On day 10, stand for one hour and then steadily increase that each day. Even just wearing shoes felt different. 

We worked all day on Christmas, pausing to make phone calls and Zoom appearances with friends and family. The cooks, Richard and Ruth, made a great dinner. I brought a small Christmas tree and set it up in my lab. It was quickly surrounded by presents as our chief scientist / St. Nick brought chocolate bars for all of us and we did a white elephant gift exchange. Though the actual exchange was delayed a few days due to weather since we had to hold it outside due to the COVID protocols.

Christmas tree atop the SOCCOM floats, stored on the back deck.

 

We crossed into the Southern Hemisphere with only a few hours left in 2020. Again, because of COVID protocols, we are delaying any crossing ceremony until we are sure we’re all healthy and can do so safely. 

 

We’ve been at sea for 8 days and still have a few more before we start deploying SOCCOM floats. In the downtime, I got a bunch of the scientists to help out with decorating them based on their names and designs from the schools that adopted them. It was easy to find volunteers for a fun arts and crafts project on the sunny back deck in calm, tropical waters. It was only then they realized that it also came with some manual labor to unstack and restack the heavy crates.

 

Some of the floats are black and can only be decorated with metallic sharpies, while the yellow ones have a broader range of colors that will show up. It was fun to work within those restrictions though, and I think the floats all turned out beautifully. I was so grateful to have had help. I am not very artistic and usually only decorate a few at time before running out of ideas. This time around, all 13 floats were decorated inside of an hour.

 

Check back for posts about the floats as they get deployed and other exploits from aboard R/V Revelle!