Helen FieldsScience Writer

I know, this is my work blog about science and dictionaries (and travel and music and whatnot), but I’m too excited and must blog about the knitting project I just started:

Doesn’t it look cool on the needle? Oh, what is it? I can’t tell! It’s a secret! I can tell you that the yellow is “Comfy,” a blend of pima cotton and acrylic, and the blue is some Cascade 220 wool left over from a sweater that I’ve finished knitting but haven’t sewn together yet. Because this is the time of year when the Christmas knitting gets serious and everything else must be dropped.

Check it out: I wrote about ice in the Bering Sea for the website of Deadliest Catch,  the Discovery Channel show about crab fishing in the Bering Sea. There’s been a lot more ice than usual the last couple of years, which is weird, what with the whole global warming thing. I explained why for the benefit of the show’s fans.

In other Deadliest Catch news, check out this awesome knitting pattern for a crab, inspired by the show.

As the scientist standing at the window next to me said a few minutes ago: “They wouldn’t show *this* on Deadliest Catch, would they?” The Bering Sea is absolutely dead calm. It looks like a pond, only flatter.

You can see a whale surface a mile away, because there is nothing between here and there. I’ve only seen two whales, a pair of humpbacks after lunch, but other people have seen minke whales and a fin whale today. I also saw some Steller’s sea lions swimming in the distance and a whole bunch of far-off harbor porpoises, and I have high hopes for orcas. I mean, what I *want* is humpbacks leaping over the bow, but I’ll take orcas.

I was interviewing a scientist when Chris got the page about the humpbacks and I dragged her up to the bridge with me to see what was going on. It worked out well, that bit of multi-tasking – we saw whales and I learned some basic physical oceanography, all at the same time.

We’re out of the ice for the last time. We’ll be back in port on Tuesday.

If you’re following my facebook updates, you’ll know that I am not, in fact, immune to seasickness. Ah well. It takes a very unusual form: I feel off balance when the ship gets to a sampling station and *stops* moving. My inner ears apparently can only deal with life when we’re actively on the move, breaking ice. Lame, huh? No nausea, though, so I can’t really complain.

The woman who runs the CTD (a standard oceanographic sampling instrument) is a knitter. Awwww yeeeahhh. That makes two I’ve found hidden in the science party, and I’ve heard rumors of two more – both men – in the Coast Guard.

We’re not far from St. Matthew’s Island and several people have seen a McKay’s bunting, a little finchy bird that nests here and nowhere else. One was hopping around while people were working on the ice yesterday, and one was hanging around the ship this morning.

I saw a bunch of seals yesterday but they were all really far away. The way to see seals up close is to hang out on the bridge all day. Too bad I have other work to do.

On Wednesday, Chris the photographer and I flew from Seattle to Anchorage. At Anchorage we were following the signs to the “L1″ gate and the signs led us out of security. And I was like, aw, dang, we have to go through security again? I have to empty my water bottle! And I did. And then we got to the gate. And it turns out, not so much with the security. Apparently on these really dinky flights, they just don’t bother.

That’s the plane that left before ours. (And Chris taking a picture of it.) Our flight had exactly three passengers. While we were waiting, the gate agent asked for our weights, then gave us new boarding passes with different seat assignments to balance the plane. It was a three-hour flight – I knitted most of the way. The flight attendant kept coming back to point out landmarks, including various volcanoes, Alaska’s third-largest lake, and her hometown. I have a picture of Mt Redoubt, but Chris’s is so much better you should just wait for our first daily dispatch, appearing here tomorrow.

On Friday I resolved my all-consuming dilemma: What knitting to take on the ship?

Clockwise, from top left: Lace scarf (in the pink bag), sock yarn, and a stack of instructions for knitting socks; yarn for lace scarf; yarn for baby blanket; assorted yarns in case I want to make a hat or something; yarn for super pretty scarf that will make me happy as I knit. The needles I need for these various projects are in the middle. I’m also going to knit wristwarmers for myself on the way to Dutch Harbor. Three flights, none shorter than three hours – I think I’ll have time.

This is probably way too much knitting, but I’d really hate to run out, and there’s no real restriction on how much stuff I take (this all fits into one tiny duffel bag).

I’ve heard from a couple of scientists on this Bering Sea trip that on last year’s cruise, there was a knitting group. Knitting! I love knitting! This leads to an important decision: What projects to take with me?

I knit really fast – one scarf is not going to entertain me for six weeks. I’m kind of on a wristwarmer kick right now, but I can make a pair of wristwarmers in two days. I could go through a lot of alpaca yarn in six weeks, and that stuff is not cheap. Anyway, I don’t know that anyone besides me actually wears wristwarmers.

Maybe this is the time to learn how to make socks. But I think knitting socks is kind of impractical, because then you end up with a sock that has to be treated with tender love, and I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of hard on socks. Also, I assume once I learn how to make them, they’ll go too fast, too.

Another option is lace. Lace knitting takes a lot of counting (knit two three four yarnover knit yarnover knit two three slipslipknit knittwotogether repeat), so it’s slow, but on the other hand, it requires concentration, which isn’t the best for sitting around watching shipboard movies.

And there’s my sweater. It’s a big project. But it requires a lot of things I don’t know how to do, which means frequent references to YouTube, and the ship isn’t going to have that kind of bandwidth. With all of these, I’m kind of worried that whatever I’m working on will get wet and/or greasy, but particularly with my precious sweater.

I could also just take all the yarn from an unraveled sweater and mess around with it. Or knit, unravel, and reknit the same yarn over and over and over.

Any ideas? (It’s also possible that my work will keep me too busy for knitting. That would be tragic.)

More Bering Sea material is up on the website! You can find out what a Van Veen grab is at my brilliant section on the various sampling tools that scientists will be using on the ship. The text borrows heavily from some material WHOI already had on their website, but I also called a few of the scientists who will be on the ship to ask more about these tools. They were very patient with me and explained how the tools work and what they do with the samples. It was really useful background information for when I’m on the trip, and I was happy to find out how friendly they are, too.

I’ve been asking everyone I talk to for advice on the icebreaker. What’s the one thing everyone tells me? Not what brand of mittens to buy or how to avoid getting knocked off the side of the ship. No, the one thing everyone agrees on is that I should bring sheets. The ship provides sheets, but apparently they’re really strict about having your sheets clean when you get off the ship, which means everyone is all stressed out about doing laundry just as the ship is coming into port. I’m borrowing a set of ancient sheets from my mom so the Coast Guard’s sheets can stay nice and clean for the whole trip.

There are plenty of other things people have told me to bring, too – a towel, steel-toed boots, a face mask – but there’s clear unanimity on the sheets.

I also learned from these interviews that last year on this cruise (with many of the same people) there was a…drum roll please…knitting group! Woo!!

The website also now has a list of people in the science party. That includes me – check out my self-portrait, from a trip to visit friend and fellow science writer Kate in Oregon in the fall. (Incidentally, also the trip where I learned how to knit.) I sent photographer-colleague Chris a picture of me on the street in D.C., which is really my natural habitat, but I guess he thought this one made me look more rugged.

Yaaaarrrrnnnn!!!!

It may just look like a pile of yarn, but…it’s my first sweater! I’ve been wanting to make a sweater, just because, I don’t know, when you learn how to knit, it seems like you should make a sweater. I knew I wanted to make a cardigan, because I never wear the regular kind of sweater, and it would be stupid to make a sweater and not wear it.

So I did what I always do these days when I’m looking for a knitting pattern: poke around Ravelry, possibly the coolest website of all time. People say it’s like Facebook for knitters, but it’s so much more. You can list your projects in there – for each one you can put in the size of needles you used, and the yarn, and record how long it took you, and whether the yarn was stupid. Then when you look at a pattern, the database is all linked up. You can see all the projects that other people have done and what yarns they used and look at their pictures.

I looked at a lot of patterns on Ravelry and settled on the “Cardigan for Arwen.” It’s super pretty, it’s got cables (yay), there’s no pesky zipper, and it’s named after a character in the Lord of the Rings. The only drawback was that the pattern costs $5.95, but considering I spent 50 bucks on the yarn, it seems a bit stingy not to want to pay the person who’s going to tell me how to arrange that yarn with sticks.

And now I have the yarn! Yay!