Valentine Over the Dateline
February 14, 2011 
7 Comments
How do you stay close from half a world away? Long absences are a part of oceanography, and months away from home are something that all sailors cope with. In centuries past, sailors left home for two, three, or more years at a time, often not knowing when they would come home and communicating only through letters sent from strange ports, months apart.
With e-mail, satellite phones, and shorter voyages, today’s sailors don’t have to put up with quite so much isolation. But today is Valentine’s Day, and everyone on the ship misses loved ones, family, and friends at home. We’re all looking forward to coming home and being reunited with the ones we love. Read on through the slideshow to see a few examples of how people keep their links with home strong:
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- Today we saw these grand cliffs at the southern tip of Coulman Island during a brief rest between snowstorms. The island was discovered by Captain James Clark Ross on January 17, 1841, and for a 19th-century sea captain his journal is quite sweet on the subject: ‘During the afternoon an unusual degree of refraction was remarked to the south-westward, which had the effect of bringing, at times, clearly into view land we had not before seen…. This land having been thus discovered at a distance of more than one hundred miles on the birth-day of a lady to whom I was then attached, and whom I have now the happiness of calling my wife, I gave her name to the extreme southern point—Cape Anne.’ [See our own Jan. 16 post for a link to Ross’s expedition map.]
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- On trips away from home, graduate student Elizabeth Halliday likes to take ‘some small, corny object’ with her and send photographs of it home to her boyfriend, Jeff Walker. Last trip it was a green monkey, and this time it was a little yellow duck that expands to 6 times its size if you put it in water. Then she crocheted a penguin to keep it company. The penguin and duck quickly made friends, so she crocheted another, larger one to keep her company on her way back home.
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- Marine technician Alan Shaw is a New Zealand native who now lives on Lummi Island, Washington. His girlfriend is a Danish artist named Ria Harboe (pictured on the monitor). They first met in 2003 when he heard she had been to Antarctica and asked her what it was like. He’s been working at McMurdo, South Pole, and on the Palmer ever since. Since he couldn’t send real flowers from Antarctica, he sent her this flower-like photo of the anemone that we found on Bruce Huber’s deepwater mooring (see Jan. 25 post). ‘Hi honey, home soon,’ he says—3 hours after his return they’ll hop onto a plane together for San Diego.
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- Dr. Angelicque White spends a few months at sea every year. To keep her company, her partner, Jen De-Vries, sends along a box full of notes and cards. It’s not always the same box—this one last came out with Angel 9 years ago. Of the long absences she said, ‘We’ve been together 10 years, so we’re used to it. Everyone in oceanography is.’ To have something to look forward to, they plan trips together. Angel has two weeks in Hawaii before the start of her next expedition, so Jen is meeting her on the Big Island for some mountain biking, diving, and running. ‘Soon, soon,’ she says.
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- Senior electronics technician Sheldon Blackman has lived on Maui, Hawaii, for 30 years. So has his wife Kathy, though they didn’t know each other for more than 10 years until they met through mutual friends. Sheldon and Kathy have a great way to deal with loneliness—Kathy sails on the Palmer once a year or so, working as a technical writer. On Sheldon’s monitor there’s a picture of Kathy sitting in the Palmer’s computer lab and looking at a photo of their wedding. On the other side of the room there’s a to-do list on a dry-erase board that still has Kathy’s writing on it.
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- Katie Watkins-Brandt adjusts the axis labels on graphs of her data as her husband, Craig, looks down. The picture is from their wedding day. Craig is a plumber (‘Very, very useful for an oceanographer,’ Katie said, ‘He plumbs our instruments and builds our filter rigs.’) as well as a musician. In 2008, while Katie was on a research trip, he composed, recorded, and sent a song to her. When the ship returned to port in Hawaii, he flew out and proposed. ‘I think about him all the time,’ Katie said. ‘Tell him I’ll take responsibility for feeding the dogs’—Ladybug and Mallard—’for the month after I get home.’
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- Dr. Cecile Mioni really misses Honey, her German shepherd. She’s had her since 2004, when she lived in Tennessee. Cecile visited the litter before the puppies were seven weeks old. Honey looked scared around others, but when Cecile picked her up, Honey fell asleep with her head buried in the crook of her arm. ‘She chose me, I didn’t choose her,’ Cecile said. She called her Honey because as a puppy she had a little nose and her ears didn’t stand up yet, like a honey bear. Now the pair live in Santa Cruz, California, where they go surfing together on Cecile’s 9′ longboard.
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- Eli Hunter checks out Coulman Island through the ship’s binoculars. His daughter’s gecko, named Gecko, keeps a sharp eye out as well. Eli’s wife, Roberta, and daughter, Charlotte, arrived in Auckland, New Zealand, today to get ready for a 2-week vacation. Eli had the idea of bringing Charlotte’s gecko to Antarctica after a minor accident several years ago involving a stuffed frog and some penguins at the Philadelphia Zoo. Eli wanted the gecko to have a chance to see some wild penguins, and sends Charlotte photos of the gecko’s travels.
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- One of the things Dr. Scott Fay misses most from home is reading Dr. Seuss stories to his nearly 3-year-old son, Ulysses. So before he left home in Philadelphia, he recorded himself reading ‘The Cat in the Hat.’ Then he photographed the pages and synchronized them with his recording so his wife, Heather Kelly, can play them for Uly. The couple met in the Peace Corps in Papua New Guinea, where Scott taught chemistry and Heather taught English. ‘I can’t wait to get home,’ Scott said. ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever felt homesick.’
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- Dr. Josh Kohut misses the ‘controlled chaos’ of weekday mornings with his wife, Courtney, and two children. Here’s how he described it to me: ‘The morning usually starts with my daughter Riley’s (1.5 year old) mischievous stomp around the house rearranging everything within reach. You would be surprised just how big a roll of toilet paper gets when it is all over the bathroom floor. My morning ends with one of the best moments of every day. We live in a great historic town in central New Jersey. Since our house is close to the school I get to walk my son Evan to there each morning. This is our time to talk about all the things on a kid’s mind as he heads to school. It is one of the things I miss the most. Evan turns 7 on the 17th of February. HAPPY BIRTHDAY EVAN!!! Family pictures on the wall and e-mails from my wife reassure me that it will all be there when I get back.’
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- The first indication we had a stowaway on board was when the galley ran out of sardines. Then a sharp-eyed blog commenter wrote in about spotting a strange figure in the Time-Lapse Tour of the Ship (see Jan. 31 post). After a search we turned up this rather grubby emperor penguin, who says his name is Pinguino. He sneaked down to Antarctica because there wasn’t enough krill in Massachusetts, but now he misses his best friend back home. He’s been looking out the window, but all he sees are snow petrels. I think I have room in my backpack to sneak him home.
We’ve been steaming toward McMurdo all day today. By the end of the day tomorrow we’ll be in port, unloading all the science equipment, trying to walk on solid ground again, and getting ready for our flights home. Tomorrow will be our last post for the blog, although we’ll continue to answer questions if you have them. For now, we wish you all a happy Valentine’s Day.
Read more in the following posts:
- Sights and Sounds of Summer in the South (Jan 16)
- The Day That Lasted Two Days (Jan 25)
- Time-Lapse Tour of the Ship (Jan 31)
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