Read Haley’s one-woman blog here. It’s all her – the pictures, the writing, everything. Whew. She’s also tweeting and writing on her own blog (in theory, anyway – she hasn’t posted since heading up to Alaska).

In other cruise news, some of the folks who I was on the Healy with last year are out in the Bering Sea right now on the R/V Thompson; read chief scientist Dave Shull’s blog posts. You may remember him from the epic tales Under the Ice and The Story of Thorium.

Eat a big breakfast
Put on the waterproof suit
No bathroom break now.

Long day on the ice
Did I get the quotes I need?
I don’t know – naptime.

Vast expanse of ice
Brownish, mucky patches, too
Filthy walruses.

In the science lounge
Give the internet a try
Server can’t be found.

Ice breaking loudly
What’s that horrible odor?
Sewage discharge time.

photo: Chris Linder. See our dispatches from the Bering Sea here.

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

Simone Welch, an elementary school from D.C., was on the cruise, too. She got super hands-on with the science, helping out several teams and learning lots of cool stuff, like how to do the hand signals for the winch.

Every hour, this website updates with the latest view from atop the ship. They’re in Juneau right now.

The Healy’s public affairs officer writes a weekly update for friends and families. Before the trip, these were basically gibberish. (“Quarters was a good chance to bid farewell to SN Chelsey Fernandez as she prepared to depart for HS “A” School.”) Now I know what everything means. Scary.

Polar Discovery (my main assignment)

Blog posts for Scientific American

Twitter – WHOI plans to use that account for other expeditions.

The photography blog Chris wrote for – learn how he got some of those photos.

There are a lot of surprises about land, but perhaps the thing I miss most about the ship is the hot water. They kept it circulating all the time, so you could go from zero to scalding in about two seconds. In my apartment, you have to run the water for about a minute to get it to warm up, and even then it’s not that hot.

The plan was to come in Tuesday morning, but they had to end the science early for equipment reasons, so the captain decided to bring the ship in early, at 5:30 Monday. To which I, and everyone within a 420-foot radius, said: yay. My flight leaves at 1 p.m. Tuesday, and I was a little bummed about flying out immediately – everyone, coasties and science and all, goes out to the bars in Dutch Harbor during the port call. So I was glad to experience that. And *now* I am ready to fly out.

Thanks for following along with my Bering Sea adventure! Once I get home and am in charge of my own destiny/internet access, I’ll post a bunch more of my cruddy pictures. In the meantime, you can enjoy the work of a pro, my excellent colleague Chris Linder, here.

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.

All the computers are tied down. I don’t think we’ve actually had any boat movement that would be dramatic enough to slide a laptop off a table, but I’m glad they’re tied down anyway. This is one of the public laptops with internet. Instruments in the lab are tied down, too. Also, a lot of work surfaces have some kind of sticky, rubbery mesh material stretched over them and stapled down, so you can set things down and be pretty sure they won’t slide away.

I was worried about seasickness before I came on board, but here’s the result: I never had any. Well, I never got nauseous. For one thing, the ship just didn’t move that much. In the ice, it mostly kind of bounces around – not the steady movement that makes you sick – and we were in the ice for the vast majority of the trip. When we did get into open water with some swells, all it did was make me a bit sleepy. We’re back in open water now, but the big, scary, stormy Bering Sea is doing its best impression of a pond.

I did get land-sick early in the trip – I’d feel dizzy when we stopped all day at the ice. I’m kind of dreading being really back on land. A science writer friend of mine who used to be an oceanographer told me he was always land-sick for three times as long as he was on the boat, which would put me into early August. Yikes. Let’s hope I’m not like him. (Well, other than his wild success as a freelancer.)

The ice is still reasonably dense here, but we’re going south and this can’t last forever. My semi-educated guess: six more hours of ice. (It’s a little before 11 p.m. local time on Thursday.)

I’m sorry to see the ice go! It’s just so fascinating – it comes in so many shapes and forms, and it changes all the time. I don’t know if I’ll ever see it again.