Being an Englishman, my knowledge of Thanksgiving is limited to the following: you eat a lot of food, catch up with family, there are yams (though I’m not sure what they are) and a turkey gets pardoned by the President of the USA.
So I’m obviously extremely excited to hear I’ll be experiencing my first one onboard R/V Falkor. As dinner approaches the sun is beating down and I do not need to interrupt the specialized Conductivity Temperature Depth (CTD) experts, Ed and Sharon, to establish that it’s over 85 degrees. Not exactly traditional Thanksgiving weather…
Our awesome hosts – Adriana, Joyce, Mildred, Greg and Arek have arranged a Pacific-influenced Thanksgiving up on the deck! So what is everyone thankful for? I grab my camera and decide to find out…
Captain Heiko is thankful for the weather. Look at that beautiful flat ocean, perfect science conditions!
Engineers Dougie, Edwin, Albert and Archel are thankful for turkey!
Everyone is thankful for cheese and pie.
Chief Scientist Joseph Resing is thankful for the ‘happy helpful people they are GREAT’. Helpful is good, but happy and helpful is what you need on a 30 day research trip!
Hostesses Joy and Mildred are thankful for the nice guests and crew on board. (And everyone onboard is thankful to them for making things so comfortable.)
Co-chief scientist William Chadwick is generally thankful for the fact we are in this amazing place getting the opportunity to do science. And currently thankful for the safe return of our second CTD today!
Everyone is thankful for friends and family and we send them all our love. But don’t worry about us, we have all now gained a little surrogate family on board R/V Falkor. All 14 nationalities joined together for the holiday season (around 2 hours…) But now it’s back downstairs for the night shift, continuing our course, watching multibeam data stream in. Seeing new resolution maps of unknown areas starting to form slowly in front of our eyes. Fortunately there are plenty of turkey leftovers for a midnight snack to keep the night shift team going. Probably for the next 26 days…
