I'm stuck inside again for the second day in a row, but this time at least its justified. With 40 knot Southerly winds and rain its definitely a day to curl up on the couch (or the lab bench) with a cup of hot chocolate and a good book (or sperm whale photo identification catalog). When your job each day is to take a 6 meter boat 10 miles offshore you can easily become obsessed with the weather. The weather forecasters for Kaikoura are actually quite good at predicting what the weather will do, however they seem to be unable to predict when the weather will arrive. A predicted storm can arrive two days later than expected, or it can happen two days earlier. Calm weather can dissapear in a second to be replaced by large seas and gale force winds. Of course none of this appears in the weather forecast.
Yesterday was a perfect example of the frustration of trying to reconcile the predicted forecast with the current conditions. The forecast for yesterday:
***GALE WARNING IN FORCE*** Northwest 30 knots in the morning rising to Northwest 40 knots late morning changing in the afternoon to Southwest 40 knots. Northerly swell 2m easing. Southerly swell rising to 2m in the afternoon. Rough seas at times.
The actual weather yesterday was slightly overcast with calm clear conditions and slight seas from 5:00am until 4:00pm. Finally a bit of southerly wind started at 4:00pm. The frustration comes from sitting inside all day waiting for strong winds and rough seas to justify my decision to stay on land. Even more frustrating is that each hour that passes the urge to go out increases, but the fear of getting caught in a storm increases as well.
Over the past two weeks we've had 8 days on the water, which isn't too bad until you realize that only one of those was a full day, and the rest were all 3 or 4 hours. I'd like to blame the Bush administration and global climate change, but sadly having a scapegoat doesn't actually change anything. So instead I offer this whiney blog posting as a sacrifice to the imaginary weather gods in hopes that they will accept a whiney tounge in cheek electronic prayer and send some good weather this way. Which brings me to the first chapter of my thesis titled: Blogging for good weather statistically proven as effective as praying to god.
But it could always be worse. At least I've got interesting people to entertain me onshore, and of course there's always heaps of work to be done maintaining the gear, fixing the boat, analyzing data. Marine gear has a nasty habit of breaking at the most inopportune times. So far we've managed to repair the boat trailer lights and jockey wheel, replace the bilge pump, replace a pulley for the hydrophone cable, repair a broken directional hydrophone... twice, and fix housings for the hydrophone time depth recorders. I'll try to post a bit more about the gear and daily work later. Now with all the equipment fixed and ready to go, we just need some good weather!
