We’re about 20 hours
away from Dutch Harbor, which means it’s about time for me to sit
down and write my last post from the Healy!
A little over a week ago
we came out of the ice just north of 75°N, 150°W, where we sampled
at the last Super Station of the cruise. Unfortunately, once we left
the ice, we were hit with strong winds and high seas, which we had to
endure while sending instruments over the side of the ship,
continuing our science program despite the bad weather. After a few
days on the rough station, we decided to head southwest, hoping to
escape the weather while continuing on the planned cruise track
towards the continental slope. Once we arrived there, we sampled a
series of closely spaced stations across the slope to understand the
interactions between the shelf and the Canada Basin interior. A
majority of those stations were sampled during my shift, which made
for an exciting night of sampling.
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| Completed stations during the cruise, with the box around the area that’s enlarged to show the closely placed continental slope stations. |
Once we finished the
slope stations, we were revisited by some more foul weather, which
persisted to the end of our sampling program for the cruise. While
the weather wasn’t great, we were fortunate to have clear skies at
night and were presented with a number of great displays of the
aurora. I was not able to get any great photos of them (but I did get
a decent one), Cory got
some great shots from the bow.
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| The aurora over the bow, taken on 4 October 15 by Cory Mendenhall, USCG. |
Only a few days after our
great aurora displays, we had a visitor from Barrow, who flew out on
one of the Coast Guard’s Sikorsky MH-60 Jayhawks and is spending
the duration of the cruise with us (the Jayhawk went back to Barrow).
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| The Jayhawk preparing to land on the Healy’s flight deck. Photo taken on 7 October 15 by Cory Mendenhall, USCG. |
Following those exciting
events, we’ve been busy shifting to normal schedules, and breaking down and packing up our lab spaces
in preparation for Dutch Harbor. We’re now well south of the Artic
Circle, and it feels a little sad that this great journey is actually
coming to an end. To celebrate the end of the cruise, the science
party cooked a special “morale meal” for all the Healy’s
residents, which was fun getting to work in the kitchen for an hour
and help out.
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| Fen cooked enough chicken to feed 145 people! |
As mentioned at the
beginning of this post, this is my last one from sea, but that
doesn’t mean this is the last post for me. I have a number of
photos from the cruise, along with some videos, that I’ll post
about and include links to so you all can experience some of the
great experiences I’ve had up north. Also, I’ll be back in
Seattle the first week of November to offload the Healy, and
I’ll be sure to write about that process.
As usual, stay tuned!
—AA
