Beam Reach

Week 3 on the boat and evaluations: official, off the record, of the program and personal

9/29/07
I’m writing this blog entry on my laptop at 6:45 PM, planning to post it when I get back to land tomorrow, which I have to admit is an event I have been looking forward to almost ever since getting onto the boat last Sunday. This was a pretty terrible week for me. The weather has become much colder and the seas have been a lot rougher. We did a good deal of sailing, which got me feeling pretty sick a couple of times. Today was the wildest day but I was not as bad as I was yesterday, maybe because it wasn’t necessary to be outside as much. Yesterday I felt so terrible, both physically sick as well as emotionally shattered that I took Ash up on her advice and went to lie down for half an hour, something that I am usually very nervous and reluctant about doing. Today I took my turn at the helm for a while, during which time I peaked at about 8.4 knots and Todd announced that I had broken the record for electricity generation, at 10.1 amps, which made me feel somewhat better about my general ineptitude this week. I think I regressed in pretty much every way that I had started to improve during my second week, and the fourth week is looming in a very threatening way; Val, Scott and Todd keep warning us that these sorts of conditions will be typical, which scares me because I just cannot function well when the weather is like this, and as much as I try I feel so powerless and inadequate.
And we (especially I) really NEED the fourth boat week because in terms of data collection we’ve not done very well this week at all. I’d say that yesterday was really our one data-day of any real substance, when we were chasing whales literally from morning till night, with some great vocalization recordings and photographs to show for it. But for me personally this was almost a lost week; I got no boat noise recordings at all. I had been hoping to switch my focus from individual boats to cumulative vessel noise at this point but there were so few boats on the days that we deployed that it was pointless to do so. There were a couple of instances at which we had really loud tankers thousands of meters away, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to use those, but that wasn’t even what I was looking for. From another angle, let’s face it, as far as policy, it’s a pretty long shot that we could try to get tankers to install quieter engine technologies; I think they’re even exempt from some regulations. Of course the huge shipping industry and the industries that use them (like petroleum) gets off easy, money talks! But anyway, venting about environmental injustice aside, as I was saying, this was a lost data week for me. We did some sound propagation tests on Tuesday, but when I tried to use the files from the orange box, and then from the blue box, to come up with a transmission loss rate, the numbers were a mess. Val helped me see that if I looked at the second number and the last number, the rate was almost perfect, -19.2 (with the theoretical ideal of -20). But I quickly pointed out, those are just two points! That’s not reliable! And Val jokingly called me a pill and said I should be excited about it, but then later admitted that I was right, that if the points between caused problems the test would have to be redone. I mean, that’s something that CAN theoretically be left to the last week because it’s just one number and I can calculate the source level with a stand-in for now, but I’d just really like to know what the REAL source levels are! (Also, what if my retest still stinks? Then what?) My lack of patience and non-stop worrying clearly make me better-suited for policy rather than scientific research. On the bright side (a very small one) Sam has been able to localize some calls, and the calls from yesterday really seem like they’ll be localizable (not a word, I know), so I can at least start working on orca source power density levels this week. Val teased me with the glass half-empty, glass half-full cliché. I’m not usually such a pessimist, but in science I definitely am, and have been every other time that I’ve worked in science research. Another reason science is not the right field for me.
In other interesting news, we had Scott on the boat with us starting Wednesday, we skipped the whale museum talk on Wednesday in favor of dinner at FHL (which was really nice because we got 6 full hours on land and showers to boot), and this was our week of program/peer evaluations as well as our preliminary sailing assessments. Val had to leave yesterday for a personal engagement and Scott has been filling in for him. He brought the program evaluations aboard, and it was supposed to be anonymous but I handed mine in first, so my identity was hardly a secret. I just hope that my comments will be considered helpful and that nothing was taken offensively. My peer evaluations, as it turned out, I had to redo when I learned that my actual comments would be read by the people they were written for. I didn’t write anything awful, but there are different ways of conveying opinions, and my initial form of expression was not what I would have wanted read. I think that you just instinctively try to use more tact when you speak directly to a person, and let’s face it, anonymous? We all have unique ways of speaking so I’ll be able to guess pretty well who says what about me, as others could guess which comments were mine. I really don’t like the fact that we’re seeing what we wrote about each other, I feel like the self-censorship for tact is not the most effective way of getting honest assessments across.
Earlier this week we had Dr. Marla Holt with us. She was very helpful to some of us, including me, she gave me some good feedback on the Erbe paper I’ve been reading a lot and she helped point me in the direction of key concepts. More generally she was also very good to talk to about graduate school admissions, taking time off beforehand, etc. I also talked to Shannon a lot this week about related questions, and particularly about her evaluation of the Beam Reach program itself and how it’s been run. The truth is that after 6 weeks here, I can honestly say that I probably wouldn’t have applied if I knew beforehand everything how everything would actually turn out. Now that I’m here I’m focused on doing as well as I can, but I’m not sure if this was an appropriate decision for me because I’m not planning to go into marine science, or even specifically marine policy, and I never had any interest in sailing, and for everyone else at least one if not both of these elements was a major point. There are other strong positives about this program that I can appreciate. I just wonder if I might not have been able to better use my time these 10 weeks otherwise. Then again, I’ve done a lot of thinking and living and the experiences I’ve had already have really helped me focus my future plans. At the end of the day, I came here planning to make the best of the opportunity that I could, and that is something that I am still able to do and am striving towards. Whether positive or negative, the program has really highlighted a lot of my weaknesses, my strengths don’t seem to help me much here. On the one hand this can help to focus me further, on the other…some of my limitations make me feel kind of helpless and almost dysfunctional. They are certainly hurting my overall performance in Beam Reach.
This has been a long and rather chaotic entry (more reflective of my thought process than of any attempt at organization). I apologize if this has caused any frustration or confusion for anyone who may have read it.