“You really live in the moment…”

Mike Dessner, Waitt Institute of Discovery Director of Operations

12-Hour Days, Seven Days a Week—Rinse and Repeat
While this is day 26 of the mission, we have been at sea for 30 straight days. We have not seen anything other than the clouds, birds, the sea and each other. No radio, no TV (only DVDs, all of which you’ve seen by now) and no newspapers other than what you get on the Net (and it just ain’t the same). You can make a call, if you have the patience for the one second delay, and we get e-mail. But you can’t go hang out with buddies, can’t take a walk and you cannot get away from anyone. There is no privacy — most everybody shares a room with at least one person, and a head (bathroom) with four others. Our universe is 200 feet of steel, 29 people and the girls. There are no secrets.

Sunrises and sunsets are the big entertainment of the day. We see the occasional bird, and when the biologist brings up his net, 10 people are likely oohing and aahing over a jellyfish you would not look twice at if you stepped over it on the beach. The food is good, but we now have no fresh produce of any kind, no eggs, only preservative quality milk and the bread is a month old, dry and crumbly from being in the freezer too long. Most everything is coming out of cans, and any variety in the menu is thinning.

“Preparing is the tough part…”

Woods Hole (WHOI) Engineer Brennan Phillips, participating in CATALYST 2 as a Mechanical Engineer/AUV Operator

People are doing pretty well with it, and everyone has his own way of coping. Some folks get grumpy and you let them. When someone is overly quiet, you check to see if he is OK, making sure nothing back at home has gone drastically wrong and then you let him have his space. I have a tendency to get a bit manic at times, and then snappish at other times. Right now, the four guys sitting in ops with me are ticked off because I asked them to turn off the music and go to headphones for a while as I try and sort through three different logs to parse the last 72 hours. Frankly, when I started to write this report, I thought I only had two days to cover, but somehow over the last three days I seem to have lost the fact that more than 48 hours had passed. Everybody on the team is working 12-hour days, seven days a week. Greg Packard and I are both up whenever anything happens, so we each average 16-hour days. We go to bed for four hours, and then get up and work for 10 or 12. Rinse and repeat. It’s a mind-bender.

When we have to wait 24 hours to see if we have been successful, everything gets a little bit sharper, has a little more edge to it. You try not to get your hopes up, but you know that if this isn’t it you are right where you started. And then the ‘what if’s’ start going though your head. What if it IS them?! Man, what is that gonna be like?!

“The experience you get is phenomenal…”

Woods Hole (WHOI) Engineer Robin Littlefield, contributing to the CATALYST 2 Mission as an AUV Operator/Technician

Then somebody gets a piece of crappy news from home and you all feel it, someone in your family has suffered and you can’t help but feel the pain and wonder what you would do if you were in the same place. By the time you actually sit down to look at photos from Mary Ann and Ginger, after too many hours without sleep and too much coffee, you just don’t know what you feel anymore. But you’re amped nonetheless.

Yesterday, as we got ready to view the data on the re-acquisition mission, you could feel the tension rising on the ship as the film crew set up in the lab for a segment. Then, our cook, GB, got a bad piece of news from home. His sister, who worked as an ICU nurse back in the world, and with whom he had exchanged e-mails just hours before, had suffered a heart attack. She died very quickly and was only 40 years old. Even if I was so inclined to order the ship come about in order to take him home (and trust me, that ain’t a decision you want to have to make), what good would it do? If we left yesterday morning when we got the news, we would not be in Pago until Tuesday morning. The next plane out is on Thursday, and then it’s another two days — easy — for him to get all the way home. It’s a solid week, in a best-case scenario, for anyone to make back to their loved ones. He is taking it amazingly well, but it hasn’t hit him yet. He comes in and calls his family on the phone sitting next to my desk. I give him the privacy I can by leaving the room, but there are two watch members sitting in the room with him. No privacy, no secrets. We all share his pain on a very visceral level and we all think to ourselves, “What if that was me?”

A lot of the people out here are married and have kids, and I am sure every one of them has had a bad moment in the last 24 hours. GB will not be at his sister’s funeral, and the best he can do is e-mail his family and call them. What do you say? Nothing. You just let him know you’re there for him if there’s anything you can do (which there isn’t), and you try not to get too personal because you don’t want to push him off into the emotional precipice he is standing on because that will only embarrass him when five minutes later, everyone on board knows all about it.

We filmed the opening of the photo files yesterday at 11 a.m. They were a very interesting set of rocks, probably some kind of basaltic flow that had high-centered on another rock and eventually shattered. If you wanted to make a pile of rocks look like a plane you probably couldn’t have done a better job. Everybody’s shoulders dropped and we all went back to our tasks. We pulled the vehicles out and sent them back down. They both are performing OK as of this minute.

And this morning at 5 a.m., GB got up out of his bunk and quietly left his room without showering so as not to wake up his roommate. He came up the stairwell outside his door one level to the darkened mess hall, and for the hour before sunrise he worked. He made some dough, floured the stainless table in his kitchen and used a wooden rolling pin and cookie cutter to fashion homemade biscuits. He worked alone in the dimly lit galley, in the early morning quiet, putting together the day’s scheduled breakfast of biscuits and gravy — a treat for us. He didn’t do it because he had to, and he didn’t do it because he wanted to. He did it because it was Saturday and that’s what he does on Saturday. Even the Saturday after his sister died.