Muffin Bottoms [not] Just another WordPress weblog

Assignment #3

5 Page Yarn

Missing Nautical Devices and Ice Cream for Movie Star Namesakes.

23Mar10

The life of a “Project O” Deckhand is not always intense; but sometimes quite eventful.

Most of your time on University of Connecticut’s Project Oceanology ship will be spent swabbing aboard ship, tidying up, coiling spiral tow lines, and making sure life preservers and vests are in their correct places. There is only one head which you’ll clean if the campus custodians aren’t on duty but also plenty of litter ashore in the parking lot, and your responsibilities in the biology lab rooms include cleaning out fish tanks and making sure the water temperatures are set.

One of the most mundane jobs of a Deckhand at Project Oceanology is assuring that all the lobster pots and other traps are serviceable, inventorying which ones might be in disrepair; but not everything is this routine. Sometimes a little old lady will slip one foot off the gang plank getting stuck between the bulwark and the pier. There’s only a tiny space in between; so you might ask how could she possibly get her whole leg stuck in there? Well it occasionally happens and you’re usually the closest person at hand to help keep her calm and loosen a mooring line if needed so she can squeeze herself out.

So just how did UConn come to own and operate some floating research labs? Well, Project O (as we deckhands nicknamed the whole program) currently deploys two — and soon three — vessels but I’m only well acquainted with the one original one from my time there as deckhand back in the ‘90s. Mostly, I’m told Enviro 2, the newer one is larger, more modern and was custom-built specifically for UConn. Even though Enviro-Lab is more humble she came to Project O with some fascinating stories to tell; and I’ll just recount a few here.

She is a 50-foot wooden lobster boat which was being used as a disguise by drug runners off the coast of Pawtucket — yes, there is a long history of smuggling, bootlegging and even blockade running near Long Island Sound that goes all the way back to the middle 1600’s – until the U.S. Customs Department confiscated it in 1986 as part of President Reagan’s War On Drugs and a few years later it was donated to UConn. When Project O acquired her, the net dragging system wasn’t serviceable because of her months in dry-dock and years where the nets were only used for show. The original plan was to remove the whole trawling apparatus just using her for daytrips pulling up core samples over the bulwark from down below in Long Island Sound. But alas, at some point the new owners realized they could just as easily repair her and gain a daily catch of various wildlife and plants which could convert the ship into a mobile living history museum of sorts.

Everything from lobsters, to squid, and even spider crabs can be gathered by grade-school students who will then see them right up close and hopefully learn there’s a whole Sound full of living breathing participants in a shared ecosystem instead of only dead or almost expired food in their local supermarket. Tables, glass tanks, and Bunsen burners help her to serve as a virtual floating science laboratory; hence the name “Enviro-Lab.”

So most days she goes out and comes back on a routine schedule planned ahead of time with curriculum in mind; but sometimes Enviro-Lab and her crew are tasked with taking ice-cream to a famous scientist and exchanging her mail for her. Helen Hunt, (no relation to the movie star, but they know each other) is a leading ornithologist studying all the diseases that birds carry between Plum Island and places like Boston and New York. She believes these highly populous areas are much too close to the U.S. government containment facility. Many birds migrate up to 300 miles away regularly and Plum Island Animal Disease Center is just six miles away from the Connecticut coast line; so our Helen Hunt is afraid that the diseases quarantined on the island travel farther than the government claims because birds eat plants and animals there and then fly all over the northeast of the U.S. mingling with other plants, animals, rocks, streams and the rest of the natural world. So she lives year-round in a shelter-half on a smaller island off Plum Island’s coast doing scientific tests on everything from tree-branches to bird-droppings and then predicts how much contaminant might leak out toward populated areas each year.

Most of her grant money goes into studying Anthrax, Encephalitis, Mad Cow, and Lyme Disease so there isn’t usually enough left over for amenities such as hot water, electricity and of course television or refrigeration; which answers the question as to why we at Project O will periodically deliver news of the world and ice-cream to Helen Hunt and her interns. She prefers Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey but whenever we can’t get that she just wants a box of Neapolitan. “Plain old pink white and brown” she called it.

Now that’s still somewhat routine scheduled into day to day events for the Project O deckhand whenever there’s enough new mail; but it’s one you will come to look forward to since it breaks up your day.

And let me tell you about an even more unexpected and almost disturbing thing that happened one Saturday morning which greatly disrupted an otherwise normal day out on the Enviro-Lab.

There was a light rain. Long Island Sound and the Thames were quite choppy, so the sea was not what we would like to call “flat.” There was much fog in the harbor. Earlier in the day’s journey a captain was teaching me about the GPS and how the government mandates a few feet of random error for each and every GPS reading so that someone can’t lock-on to a military ship or aircraft. Many of the Project O captains come from a pool of local ferryboat pilots who give one day a month or entire weekends to the University pro-bono. This captain, who I will just call Horn Rims, because of the glasses he wears, was no exception.

Horn Rims handed me binoculars and asked, “What’s wrong with this picture, First Mate?” Now since the crew handling the Enviro-Lab consists of only half a dozen people, as deck hand you’re often called ‘First Mate’ because you’ll will be Captain’s assistant for all things at times when the science teachers focus primarily on teaching and chaperoning the school kids.

“Nothing comes to mind,” I told him.

“You don’t see anything missing?” asked Horn Rims, with a tone in his voice that showed he was astonished I could miss something so massive.

“Nope.”

“Well I’ll tell you,” he said, “because I’m in radio contact at all times and I already know what’s supposed to be right about there. Look again and I’ll tell you, you’ll remember it. Right about there. That’s supposed to be Red Channel Buoy #6!”

“Huh? What the…”

He explained to me that a Trident nuclear-powered submarine had hit the large can on its way back to the U.S. Navy’s lower base in Gales Ferry and likely never even felt a nudge as it collected up the entire buoy including a few links of chain that weigh about 75 pounds each!

“Yupper,” said Horn Rims, “carried it clear up the river and dropped it yonder somewhere between the Odd Fellows Home and the USS Nautilus museum as if she hadn’t been carrying anything in the first place.”

The Navy didn’t even know about it yet but the Coast Guard sure did, and that’s how Horn Rims knew, from the chatter on the radio. And the Navy was sure to hear of it soon and then go immediately into cover-up mode making sure that the New London Day never found out about it; or at least they hoped reporters would agree to ignore such an embarrassing story.

“We’ll probably see the buoy floundering around up there,” said Horn Rims, “while we head toward the Yantic river; or at least we’ll see the Coast Guard out there with their helicopters and cranes struggling with how to wrestle it back down the river to where it’s supposed to stay.”

Just then I put one leg up on one of the bench seats so I could re-tie my Teva Sandals when all of a sudden old Horn Rims gave one leg of my trousers a brisk tug.

Yes, he pulled my leg.

Like I’m pulling yours!