So being my typical self I forgot my CF card reader at home in Ohio. It was a $25 dollar mistake, but if that is the only thing I forgot then I am felling pretty good.
Apparently I didn’t have as many photos as I originally thought. so there are not many but they are pretty cool.
So that is what I have so far. I promise to get more this week and of better quality. I am not leaving anywhere till Christmas eve so i plan on getting out and trying to get some photos.
Till next time
Hi everyone, I know that it looks like i have been sitting in the Seattle airport for about a month but those are only rumors. I finally have a bit of time to catch everyone up on what the heck I have been doing and what it is I will actually be doing for the next three or so months. So lets get to it.
I am now living in Anchorage Alaska (temporarily), while here i attended a three week training to be come a certified National Marine Fisheries, Groundfish Observer. What you ask is that? Great question. I am a representative of the National Marine Fishery Service (NMFS) and it is my duty to collect information from commercial fishing boats that operate in the Gulf of Alaska (GOA) and the Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands(BSAI) Fisheries. My job is to go out on to these vessels and to collect species composition data, Sex/Length/Weights, Otoliths (fish ear bones) and some other things. All of this data is used in real time or near real time to manage the north pacific ground fish. All of the rules are provided through the Magnuson-Stevens Act Revision 2006. Fishing vessels that wish to continue to fish (with some exceptions) are required to carry an Observer (that is me). It is going to be a very different job then i have ever had. I am excited about getting back to sea rough or not and I am still getting to do something with my hands outside (even when it is –40, ugh), so really it is going to be a great job.
My three week training was intense! In three weeks I learned how to identify fish that could be found in the fisheries that I could work in, I also learned that my attention to detail (read as anal retentive) when filling out paper work finally paid off. Paperwork is the name of the game for this job, I have six types of forms, minimally, that i have to fill out for just one fishing vessel. doesn’t sound like a lot but one of those is a raw data form called a deck sheet and every time I sample I have to fill those out. Most of the time i will be filling out like four to five a sample with six samples a day giving me a grand total of 30 deck sheet a day. Lots of writing. We also learned a lot about random sampling and how it applies to real life situations. I can finally say that I am starting to grasp what they were trying to teach me in stats class so long ago.
This training I said was intense, and that is truly an understatement. classes started at 0800 every day and went till 1700. There is also the fact that I walked to training everyday which is a mile and a half each way. These were long days of going over the manual, going over homework, Fish ID labs and test taking. The pressure is high due to the fact that if you don’t do the homework or fail any test, which is anything below an 80%, you were dropped from the program. Unfortunately we lost two people during the course of training. We lost one after the first test and one because of homework. Homework, this is not your average everyday run of the mill homework, most of the time it would take four to five hours to complete the written part filling out the various forms that we use. Even when you were done with that you still have a few hours of reading every night with reading questions. it was insane! Thankfully I did my work every night when I got home, after the briefest of conversations with my wife. Sorry they were so short baby.
The best day of training was our survival training. It was a whole day dedicated to what to do during emergencies at sea and what we should do to survive should an accident happen at sea. the biggest part was us at the pool donning our immersion suits and getting into the pool and boarding the survival raft. the immersion suit, also called a Gumby suit, is the one piece of survival equipment that will hopefully save our lives if we have to abandon ship. they taught us different was to link up in the water so we could stay together, how to turn over our raft should it flip and how to get into the basket that the Coast Guard uses. We also learn how to throw life rings and life slings to a person who might have fallen overboard. here is a picture of me in my survival suit.
It was a welcome break form the rigors of class.
I am happy to say that I successfully passed the class!!!! It was such a relief to see my final grade (93%) on my final exam. So now I am an official North Pacific Groundfish observer.
So the next steps, first I will be getting a physical on Monday. Apparently they need to make sure i am breathing before heading out to sea. From what the Priors (the people who have had contracts before) tell me it is a joke. After the physical on Monday the plan is to fly out to Dutch Harbor on Christmas Eve and then board my boat on the 26th. the current plan is for me to be on board a Longline vessel for my entire contract which should take me to March of next year.
Not much to be honest. I have been getting used to the time difference between Ohio and here, I always have to remind my self that Gina and the kids day is pretty much over by the time I get home from training. I have also been getting used to the short ‘daylight’ hours here. Not really much daylight but a brightening of the sky really. The COLD is something else that I am becoming accustomed to as well. Last night was our coldest night since i have been here (-7) but I have slowly gotten used to the fact that everything here is cold and covered in snow.
I have also seen two birds here that made my life list the Black-billed Magpie and the Bohemian Waxwing.
last night I went out to purchase my work gear. I will have photos later to show everyone.
You might notice that the photos are not of my usual quality, they are from my phone and they are good for what they are. I was sitting down today to start blogging when i realized that i had forgotten my card reader in Ohio and i didn’t have a cable to connect my camera to the computer. If that is the only thing i forgot at home then I am ahead of the game. I plan on heading out to WallyWorld today or tomorrow to get a new one and some other odds and ends that i still need.
I will post more later.
and so we go…
The first leg is behind me and I have one more to go. The first flight out of Cincinnati was fine, I must say however that I am sad to see the free meal go the way of the dinosaur. It also saddens me to see that it now costs for luggage to go with you. $20 with Delta. Not really sure why, I can ‘carry on’ my luggage as long as i am not traveling for more then a weekend.
I go tot watch a cute movie on the flight, “(500) Days of Summer”. good indy film the lead actress also played Dorothy in the SyFy “Tin Man”.
Food also costs unless you are a first class passenger then it is included. I am not first class I don’t even think that i am third class. I will send something out when I land in Anchorage.
Here is a photo of me sitting across from my gate.
This is it… I am as ready as I will ever get, the bags are packed, the lists have been double checked and I am still not sure I have enough.
Whew, I am ready. I have a good friend who spent the time on a greatly detailed list of what I needed for being an observer. So a huge shot out to Jennifer!!! WOOT!
I leave tomorrow for Anchorage, AK via Seattle. I am very excited about this next adventure. It is going to be HARD, DIRTY work. I have not had to work like this for a very long time. I think this could be a very rewarding job.
I have no idea where I will end up, my guess will be Dutch Harbor but I will let everyone know what it is when i get there.
Also I have Verizon as my cell phone carrier now so I should have service, probably spotty, in Anchorage and maybe Dutch Harbor.
I will keep you all up to date via my blog.
And so we go…
I am now an employee of TechSea International. I will be leaving on 27th or 28th of this month to start the next adventure of my life.
Man I can’t believe this is happening, when I leave i leave for four months and live in Alaska… What the Hell am I thinking.
So a Low down on what I will be doing. I will be working for the company Tech Sea International. I will be employed as an Alaskan Ground Fish Observer. I will randomly sample the takes and run some stats on the by-catch and determine if everything is with in standards. If i am put on a large processing boat I could be out for two months. If I am out on the smaller boats I will be in and out quite a bit. As soon as I get up there I will start photo graphing avery thing and documenting everything as well.
I am not sure what to expect as far as internet goes but I will update you all as often as I can. I will also be switching cell phone providers so that when I am in port I can call home so, keep your fingers crossed, I might be in phone contact at a minimum.
On last thing, I will get to check something on my bucket list, See the Northern Lights. I am very excited about that.
and so we go… Until next time friends.
I know this is a little late in posting, especially since I am home now. I did want to have a more full accounting of what happened while I was in NC, I have not changed anything from this posting from when I originally wrote it, enjoy…
Well everyone, It has been some time since I have posted and thought I would catch you all up on what has been happening and what might be happening in the future. So here we go…
How I got here:
The Wednesday before I was to leave for home, with out a job, my roommate’s wife came to me and said there was an immediate opening in North Carolina as a turtle observer. All I had to do was send the hiring lady my resume tweaked for turtles. I called Roxy, the hiring lady, and we talked about my limited experience with turtles and after a few back phone calls and emails I was hired. This all took place in a matter of a few hours. Suddenly I had a job that I had to leave for immediately. I went home that day and started packing to leave the next morning. The next day I made it to D.C. for a short stopover to catch a few winks and continued on. At 1300 I reached Nags Head and tried to catch a few winks before I had to go to work.
Where I am:
I am in Nags Head NC. working as a turtle observer. The hours are from sunset to sunrise, sort of. It took a while to get on a schedule since I was working days for the past four months. Once I got on a schedule this job is super easy and super boring. We sit in what is called the dump shack
The dump shack can also be called the smoke shack, My clothes stink like I am a smoker again. they also have a faint tinge of diesel to it, in other words I reak of nastyness. My job for this contract requires me to be on the beach for the entire night. we have to conduct three beach surveys every night to ensure there are no impacted turtles by the dredging operations. The rest of my time is spent in the dumpshack sitting around doing NOTHING! It is BORING to the extreme. recently I started bringing my laptop out to the site so I can watch movies. Mark and I head over to the survey shack, looks a lot like the dunpshack only no smoking and much cleaner, and watch movies between our surveys. makes time go much faster. We also take naps occasionally, usually during the movies. We are done only when the last pipe is removed off the beach. There is only one piece of pipe left on the beach but it is a HUGE piece and requires a cap that is not on site. once that is put on and the pipe is removed I will be done. I have been coming out to this site for three days now and have done nothing but sit in the shack and walk out to the pipe and verify that there are no turtles there. It takes about 30 minutes to complete and then there is nothing to do, except go fishing. I have been fishing fo rthe past three nights. I have caught a skate, blue fish, a whiting and a black drum.
What is on the horizon:
I got an e-mail from one of the ground observers i applied to and it looks like that is in the front runners of job possibilities. pretty much it is the only front runner so it looks like i am going to head out to Alaska for the next job. The best thing about the ground observer job is the pay. it pays $135-160 a day regardless of if i am on a boat or not. so it is great pay. I am sad that I have not heard anything from some of the other jobs that I have applied to, I really wanted to have a job working with birds but I need to pay the bills and this job has the potential of doing just that.
Well that is all i have for now, I will leave you with some photos from around the work site and a couple of videos
And so we go…
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