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Expedition
to the Mariana forearc
Mar.
23 - May 4, 2003
Day
27, April 18th
(click
on any image for the larger version)
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Day
27 Secure Sewers Abaft of the Beam
“Now
hear this fore and aft, the sewer system is secure.” Today that
announcement came over the public address system, booming through
the ship, inside and out. I thought to myself, “Well, I hope so—I’d
hate to have an insecure sewer system.” I wasn’t the only one who
didn’t know this terminology. The announcement meant the engineers
were working on the system and we couldn’t use the toilets or sinks.
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| Ships
have their own language and although some of the terms are obvious,
some leave you wondering. Just getting from one place to the other
requires a whole new vocabulary. Lengthwise a ship is fore and aft,
but crosswise it is athwartships. The front is the bow and the rear
is the stern. If you are moving towards the bow you are going forward,
but if you are moving toward the stern you are going aft. If you are
nearer the bow than another object you are forward of it, but if you
are nearer the stern you are abaft of it. |
Hasheem securing the dogs on a watertight door |
| A
ship is divided down the middle, from bow to stern, by a centerline.
If you are nearer the centerline than another object you are inboard
of it, and the object is outboard of you. Facing the bow, everything
to the left side of the center line is to port and everything right
of the centerline is starboard. Port and starboard are left and right
and there isn’t anything very tricky about that. When I was a kid
my dad told me I could remember it by thinking of the expression,
“He left port.” |
Port hole in the mess |
The
midpoint of the centerline is called amidships or the waist. The
widest point of the ship, usually in the midship region, is the
beam. I am currently abaft of the beam (I like the sound of that).
You
don’t go downstairs in a ship, you go below. Going up is to go topside.
Once topside, if you start climbing the rigging, the mast or the
stacks, you are going aloft.
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The
floor is the deck and if it’s outside it’s the weather deck. The
ceiling is the overhead, but the planks on top of the ship’s liquid
storage tanks are called ceilings. The walls are bulkheads. A door
through a bulkhead is a door, but a door through the deck is a hatch.
The window is the port hole (even when it’s on the starboard side).
Cooking
is done in the galley and we eat in the mess. The bathroom is the
head. The place you sleep is never the bedroom, but the stateroom.
Companionways lead from one deck level to another according to the
book on seamanship – we would call them stairs but on this ship
everyone calls them ladders.
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Robert H. going up a ladder. |
All
doors leading to weather decks are designed to be watertight.
The doors have special fittings called dogs to secure them. When
you open or close these doors you dog or undog them. There are
a zillion, maybe more, doors on this ship. Many seem unnecessary
but they are there to prevent fire from spreading. My thumbs are
getting plenty of exercise turning dogs and door knobs. You wouldn’t
think of your thumb in terms of doorknobs, but if you turn enough
of them, your thumbs will let you know.
I
am working on my terminology but I still have a tendency to go
“upstairs” to visit the “bathroom.”
So
now that I know where I am and where I’m going maybe I should
tell you what we did today.
We
completed another section of mapping from Big Blue Seamount to
Quaker Seamount and then launched Jason to continue exploring
the magnificent chimney formations we found there. We got in a
14-hour session, taking pictures, push cores, samples of mud,
rocks and chimneys, and traversed a prominent ridge. We were almost
done with the planned activities, when a hydraulic hose to one
of Jason’s manipulator broke and we had to surface. A midnight
piston core was next on the agenda. This ship never sleeps.
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Science
Summary - Day 27, April 18th
Science
Objectives, Day 27:
The
twenty-seventh day of the cruise, Apr. 18, we will survey northward
to Quaker seamount with EM300 and hydrosweep after which we will
perform a lowering in order to explore farther east along the summit
fault trace. The lowering will be done in hopes of determining the
extent of fluid seeps along the fault trace and to try to obtain
longer push cores that will permit us to get a better set of pore
fluid data. We anticipate the dive will take all day and the vehicle
will be recovered around midnight.
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