November 2, 2009 The Weekend and Start of the "Kiddie Cruise"

For those living in Seattle and if this is any consolation, it is raining in Honolulu. It reminds me of the Emerald City except for the temperature. It may be 50 degrees and rain in Seattle but the cold humid air makes it feel much lower but today is cool for Hawaii. The weekend was uneventful with work and meeting a fellow ET I have not seen since Seattle a few months back. The pierside Internet connection worked for a short time before timing out when trying to use a link. As I said previously inport periods provide little excitement due to its nature of working like an office.

Today began the end of the season cruise. It is an educational outreach for several Hawaii high schools. It was originally scheduled for six days but cut back to four due to budget constraints. This put a monkey wrench in my maintenance schedule. If there were no educational cruise I could have taken sensors and such down last week and already have them on their way or at vendor’s location for annual maintenance. Since it needs to be used for demonstrations, I had to leave everything in place. We return to Honolulu on Thursday and this means I am looking at twelve-hour days on the weekends in trying to have everything packed and sent on Monday morning. I will send myself back to Seattle on Monday afternoon.

I got up early this morning to prepare getting underway. I had spent much of my spare time putting together an Intranet site for the educators and students to use. If they wanted to view a video showing a segment of our operations, you click on a link. It was no use as the monitor (a large screen TV) was hijacked and use for other purposes. There was no interest in utilizing it to show activities of the ship and the work and hours put into the project was in vain. In fact, the ET and engineering people were shut out from giving any presentations. Everything already planned and choreographed. Shown to the students were work of scientists and the deck coxswains that took the scientist/divers to their locations. One of the participants asked me how I got out of it and I replied, “Lucky I guess!”

The students from Oahu finished around 2:30 PM and we sailed around Oahu to head for Molokai. We will be there tomorrow for another group of students for show and studies.

Despite the warm weather and the jest by a transplant about returning to the mainland, I told him the mainland was home. Even if the temperatures were in the 30’s and snow is on the ground, it is still home and that is where I yearn to be.

Aloha from Molokai!