Friday, July 26th 2024
Transit day! We’re finally on the move. It’s going to take 42 hours to reach Great Sitkin, our next stop. Everyone is finally cleaning their clothes and their bodies, and the float coats and waders are getting a chance to dry out a little (if not smell any better). We also get to sleep in - the schedule has been pretty relentless, with surveys sometimes starting at 8am and not ending til 10pm. Today we’re all just cruising in our cozy clothes.
Still internetless, I take the chance to finish some paintings and sketches I’d started and chat up the team as they stumble through the galley. Nobody’s hitting the snack drawer today, since we’re not moving our bodies as much. Some people even use the rusty elliptical machine in the cargo room.
The entire trip has been along the Ring of Fire, but we’re now in a particularly highly concentrated area of active volcanoes. We pass through the Islands of Four Mountains. This chain comprises six tightly grouped volcanoes: Carlisle, Cleveland, Herbert, Kagamil, Tana, and Uliaga. There is a theory that they are the tops of one massive volcano. Cleveland is incredibly active, though we can’t see it above the low ceiling.
The clouds lift enough to let us see a couple of fumaroles, which are vents close to the base of the volcano where the water hits the lava and creates steam. We all head up to the deck and wheelhouse to look at them. Hailey and Rachel play Band of Horses - The Funeral and the fumarole puns come thick and fast.
Then we slowly pass a cliffside murre colony on Kagamil, arguing about whether it’s a murmuration or not and the murre puns make me want to jump into the sea. But I don’t, because the rocks are so beautiful - purples and rusts at the bottom shifting into dusty greens and golds from the lichen near the top. And tiny little black and white birds all over it. I try to draw the swirls in the volcanic rocks.
The landscape here is incredibly young, still changing all the time. The refuge used to have a field camp on Kasatochi, an island in the Andreanof Group. Brie especially loved it, doing three seasons there watching the auklets. It erupted on August 7th, 2008. Ray was one of the two humans on the island at the time, and made it off safely (after a very stressful evening), but the colonies they were studying were wiped out. The nesting seabirds returned the following year as part of their normal migration, but the rocks on which they laid their eggs were now piles of ash. The auklets wound up dropping their eggs in the water - the kelp at the base of the island was full of them.
But the island is slowly recovering. Lupine is one of the first plants to come back after an eruption, and parts of the mountainside is splotched with purple. Seals and sea lions returned right away, and even the auklets are apparently back now that enough of the ash has blown away to nest. There still isn’t much diversity, but it’s being studied to learn about how environments recover from eruptions. (The Tiĝlax̂ is taking some entomologists, botanists and soil folks there after we finish our invasives cruise.)
We get a visitor - a storm petrel sneaks onto the ship. They’re burrow nesters, and when we pass through areas where they live the crew has to make sure the doors are closed. They’re prone to hiding in people’s Xtratufs or float coats and barfing in there. The stowaway is located and thrown overboard.
The water is not the smoothest - I have my second bout of queasiness on the trip. I take lots of naps and watch an episode of The Bear. Janice has thawed half of a giant ham for dinner, which is a commitment. We will be seeing a lot of our new friend Ham over the coming days.
In other kitchen news, the ship’s sourdough starter Fritz gets fed. Janice makes us brownies in the morning and the entire boat reeks of them all day. We’re crawling out of our skin until dinner when we’re finally allowed to eat them. Dinner conversation with the USDA crew is frequently about scat samples they’re investigating, making eating a little bit of a challenge.
Katie and I make brownie ice cream sundaes and rewatch the documentary about the Aleut from the museum (there’s a DVD of it on board). A well-earned day of rest - we’re pretty sure we’re hitting the ground running when we finally reach Great Sitkin tomorrow.
OMG The Band of Horses reference— brilliant! Sorry the puns nearly drove you overboard, but I’m enjoying just the idea of it from here. Thanks for this amazing diary— it sounds like a life changing residency for any artist. ✨🙌🛥️