The day I get seasick

So the weather got worse throughout the day yesterday and overnight.  By this morning the seas were 8-12 feet all the time, with 15-20 ft waves (or more) some of the time.  Yesterday I took some Dramamine in the morning.  I hate how it makes me feel – like I have cotton for brains and makes me sooo sleepy.  This morning I didn’t take any and was feeling just fine, until I went to sit in the wheelhouse before lunch.  Sitting up there, about 30-40 feet above the water (if it was calm out), and watching the horizon appear, then disappear, appear, disappear, over and over while crashing down on the waves and having spray pellet the windows…yep, I was a goner.  I threw up, but at least I made it to a bathroom.  Then, ate lunch, took a Dramamine.  Slept some.  Then we were on the next station and it was time to go work.  I feel better when I’m working…less thinking about the motion.  The motion is also not as bad in our stateroom as it is in other places of the boat.  The stateroom I’m in, which I share with another woman, is as close as you can get to the middle of the boat, so there’s not as much up and down motion there.  

While standing out on deck the waves are high enough that sometimes you have to look up to see the tops of them.  They don’t crash over the top of the boat – they aren’t that big - but when we slide sideways into a trough and before the boat bobs back up the other side, that’s when you are eye level or looking up to see the tops.  I don’t know exactly how high we are off the water here…maybe 12-15 feet on deck.  Ugh, puke-fest.

Sorting a haul full of jellyfish, pomfret, and a couple of salmon.

It was too rough to do oceanography stuff at the first station.  We tried doing it for the second, but then broke some of the sampling ends on the bongo nets when they were crashing into the boat in the wind while trying to retrieve them.  They are like big sails and when it’s this crappy out, they just bash about.  So for the third and fourth stations again no oceanography.  Good.  Nobody wants to break the $150,000 CTD unit…

This is a saury.

Tonight the weather looks like it might clear up a bit.  The seas are down from their peaks this morning and afternoon.  The sun even poked out a bit.