top of page
jonros74

12 - The seasick oceanographers

Hi Everyone,


I hope you are all doing well and are enjoying the holidays. The waves have been picking up today which has been a bit of a shame for our work and productivity. This is for two reasons, firstly that we are unable to do some elements (such as the fishing/net work and to a lesser extent the physical oceanography CTD casts) when the waves are strong, but also as the waves get stronger nausea becomes more prevalent and this greatly reduces the productivity and focus of everyone.


We are all generally getting our sea legs and feeling more comfortable with the waves, but the 4+m short period waves were still taking a toll. On top of this is the fact that most of us are either taking no seasickness medication any more or just the stugeron variety. At the beginning of the cruise many of us were using seasickness patches behind the ear (same active ingredient as kwells) but a number of people discovered that their close vision up to about 50cm was becoming very blurry. Interestingly, some of these people did not mention this and we only worked this out as they asked other people to read things for them. Once we established that this symptom was quite widespread we managed to trace the cause as a side effect of the patch’s active ingredient (thankfully temporary). However, this was so prevalent and inconvenient that we have all steered clear of the patches and kwells since then, despite their efficacy.


However, even when staring at the horizon to evade seasickness we managed to entertain ourselves. The ship provides a newspaper on the ship which has a fun crossword. We spent a good 45 minutes working together to complete some particularly hard sections, we struggled particularly with answers for “dreamer’s fruit (5)”, “auspices (5)” and “claim (4)”. I’ll send out the answers with the next blog if you are interested in making a guess. Watching the horizon was also good for wildlife, although the waves did make spotting them more difficult. We did see a few seals playing around the ships, and there were rumours of penguins but I again failed to see them.


In the evening the waves were too strong to do our planned nets but just manageable for some late night (9pm and ~midnight) CTD casts. I confess to have gone to sleep before the second as my shift was over beforehand. However, in the meantime as we sailed towards the CTDs and waited for them to be taken we spent some productive time engaged in the ship’s favourite card games. These are Kaboom (which I had never heard of and am a big fan) and Shed. Needless to say, there were some glorious victories and epic failures, including when I managed to remember my card wrong three times in a row in a game of Kaboom. I’ll attach the rules for kaboom below, the rules for shed are easily available online.


Kaboom rules:

  1. Deal each player 4 cards face-down, do not look at them (jokers excluded)

  2. The aim of the game is to have the lowest value of the hand when the game ends. Cards have their face value except for the values and special powers below:

    1. Ace: 1

    2. King: 0

    3. Queen: 12

    4. Jack:-1

    5. 10: Look at someone else’s card and choose whether to swap one of yours with it (without looking at your own cards)

    6. 9: Swap one of your cards with another person’s (blind)

    7. 8: Look at someone else’s card

    8. 7: Look at your own card

  3. During each turn you may draw a card either from the deck or the discard pile. If it is a card with a power (7,8,9,10) you must play it and use the power. Otherwise you may either swap it face-down for one of your face-down cards or place it on the discard pile.

  4. At ANY point in the game, you can try to “snap” one of your or someone else’s cards with the top discard.

    1. If it is a correct snap (often people make a mistake remembering their cards) then the card is discarded and you have reduced the number of cards in front of you.

    2. If you snap someone else’s card then you are allowed to replace their card with one from in front of you.

    3. Once a discarded card has been snapped once it cannot be snapped again. Only one snap each time

  5. Once someone thinks they have a good hand, they can say “Kaboom” on their turn instead of taking a card. In this case everyone else has one turn before the game ends, during which the person who said “Kaboom” is protected and their cards cannot be touched or changed in any way

  6. After this round the person with the lowest score wins, although the person who said “Kaboom” has one point added as a disadvantage. Any ties are decided in favour of the person with the most ties

30/12/22

22 views

Recent Posts

See All

56 - A Warm Welcome

This blog post will be a rather short one, as today was spent almost entirely flying home. There wasn’t much of a view from the plane as...

55 - Cerro San Cristobal

Our flights out of Chile left in the mid-afternoon from Santiago, so we wanted to make the most of our trip in the morning. We did spend...

54 - Back to Civilisation!

Today was our long travel day, out of the Torres del Paine and Patagonia, and back to civilisation. We started our day with the catamaran...

Comments


bottom of page