On the airport!

Here I am in Logan, along with 6 of my sailor friends waiting for the flight to Seattle. I just wanted to post some cool links so you guys can follow the boat using the interwebs:

Twitter Feed of Boat: http://twitter.com/SEA_Seamans

Geographical Position of the Boat: http://www.sea.edu/voyages/current_seamans.aspx

Use these links to check in with my boat and make sure it hasn't gone to the bottom of the ocean.

Take care guys!

-R

Less that one week for boarding!

What up guys,

Its 6 days till we board the ship in Hawaii. At this time in two days (on friday) i will be on a bus heading to Boston to board my hawaii flight.

Last week has been good here at SEA. I went to Boston on the weekend which was really fun and useful. I discovered the beauty of the garment district and decided that that will be the place which I make all my future clothing purchases. I also had the chance to go to the Kebab Factory, a fantastic indian restaurant with lots of tasty goodies.

Back in Woods Hole its all about working in our projects and papers. I have 1500 word paper due tomorrow which I really don't want to do. I also have a test tomorrow. All this work is just making us more eager to get on the plane to Hawaii.

I have been busy watching how Argentina totally dominates the World Cup and I am looking forward to watching the Argentina-Mexico game on Sunday at 6am Hawaii time. I am also rooting for Germany to get first place in their group and thus we would get Germany-England for the round of sixteen (yay!).

I still need to get some stuff for my trip such as good boots. I found some yesterday but they were almost 60 bucks and no hispanic in his right mind would pay that amount of money for the mud-boots they had in the store.

The captain explained the watch system to us and its really cool. Our shifts change as the days go by so we will have the opportunity to do everything on board at least once. I look forward to being the helmsman (steering the ship) and to be the assistant engineer on the ship. On Monday I met this really cool engineer that works here at SEA and I asked if they had any open positions for a MechE like me. He said they always needed help so maybe in two years I'll be working for SEA.

I will be staying in Waikiki and I already have mapped the best places nearby to watch the world cup matches. Also I got conformation by Jeff that he is indeed going to radio the scores of the match to us in the ocean.

In the meanwhile I have a lot of work to do and the Germany-Ghana game to catch. So I'll try and update you at least once or twice before I leave to hawaii.

-R

2 weeks till boarding the ship...!

Yep guys, you read the title right... I am 14 days away from boarding the SSV Robert C. Seamans and sailing it to San Francisco.

Everything in woods hole is pretty good. I have been eating well (probably too much). My housemates know more about me alreayd and yesterday I made the best "that's what she said" joke I have heard in a while. Also they are now aware of how "important" race is for me. Basically they are getting to know the real me.

Nautical Science is pretty awesome. We are learning how to navigate using the stars and the sun. It is super interesting and yesterday I got to use a Sextant (yay!) for all you ignorants here is a picture of a sextant:




It is used to find the angle that the sun makes with the horizon and then this is corrected to give the angle between the center of the earth and the center of the sun. THis can then be compared to references and can give you lines of position that you can intersect to get your location on a chart. Pretty awesome indeed.

There is one thing that bothers me here though, my oceanography teacher (a grad student from stanford) does not take mathematical correctness seriously (I am not even talking about rigority in proofs) and calls "angular velocity" things that are not ang. velocity. He also gives incorrect descriptions of the cross product and basically undermines mathematical correctness. It's ok though I need to get used to this for when I leave the MIT world (i wish I could stay at that world forever).

We are visiting Salt Marshes tomorrow and then on Thursday we are going to an all day field trip to new bedford. Should be fun experiences, I will be posting some pictures for you guys tomorrow.

World Cup Update: ARGENTINA!!! Argentina has been one of the best sides so far (only second to Germany) we would have totally won at least 4-0 if it wasn't for Nigeria's keeper awesome performance. Italy and Portugal have been disappointing (screw you Cristiano Ronaldo!) and Brazil had to sweat to beat North Korea. Honduras plays tomorrow (GO CENTRAL AMERICA) and Spain makes her debut, hopefully it will be a Spain- Argentina final on the 11th and Argentina will end with its third cup title. Good news for us mariners, I talked to a dude here at SEA today and I got told that he would relay the info. of the world cup to us at sea so that we know what happens. It sucks, but at least its better than not knowing who wins for 2 weeks after the final. It also means that if Argentina wins and we all die in the ship I will die happy.

-R

End of Week 2 at SEA

Hey Dudes and Dudas,

I just ended week 2 at SEA. Pretty full week with 2 tests and quite a bit of assignments. I did well in my Piloting Test (yay! I'm not gonna get the ship lost) but I did not do that well in my oceanography one (apparently White Shark Café is not a biogeographical zone after all) I am pretty sure I passed though. I am getting ready for another cookout later tonight and we are gonna celebrate one of my roommate's 21st bday (should be pretty fun.

WORLD CUP BABY! First day ended with 2 ties... pretty dull but I must say that Mexico was extremely lucky in getting that draw against the host. They were inches away of losing their first game and must step it up for the 2nd matchday. France and Uruguay were disappointing too and probably won't make it too far. ARGENTINA PLAYS TOMORROW... I am very excited and will be watching the game with my seaman friends. On the other hand I also found out that I probably won't know who won the world cup until 2 weeks after we land in San Francisco... I almost cried when I heard this but I am doing my best to convince certain people to relay vital World Cup information to us at sea.

Today in Nautical Science we did this cool thing where we went to the beach and did a piloting exercise there and we practiced using a compass and aids to navigation (like lighthouses and buoys etc). It was an awesome way to spend classroom times. i'll also attach some pictures of this to this post.

-R

PS: The right answer for the most recent poll is "my head is gonna explode" I'll let you figure why

PPS: Did I use enough awkward grammar Ellen?

Boston for a day...

So, I woke up today and went to class to learn more exciting piloting stuff. After that I had a thermohaline circulation lab! (yay!) I also learned cool stuff about ice cubes and salt water. After that I departed to Boston at noon. Pretty smooth ride, when I got to Boston I went to BU to tell them I am not an illegal, I was pretty successful at that. After that I walked down Commonwealth Ave and ran into the puto Ernesto Reza and we talked for a little bit. After that I met up with a certain curly Jew and she came with me to the station and then I came back to campus.

Not a super exciting day but a good one, I will now go to study for my test tomorrow.

-R

Week 1 at SEA

Hey guys,

I have been out of the blogging business for the last couple of days but I'll try to catch you guys up with my summer so far. Life in Woods Hole has been awesome. I have been going to the beach numerous times. Playing frisbee in the backyard, cooking with my house and grilling with the other houses.

Classes are not too hard, but they require a lot of reading and work. I am taking three classes:

Nautical Science: The captain of the boat is the teacher for the class and she tells us about the weather and how to read it. Also today we learned our first piloting techniques (i.e. how to know where we are and steer accordingly). This is my favorite class by far.

Oceanography: This class is all about science of the oceans and how they work. A lot of reading and memorizing words (something i have not done for a while). It is generally ok, lectures are not great but they are not bad either.

Maritime Studies: This is a literature/history class. We learn about columbus and read Thoreau. I like this class because its relaxing and today we got to go to this awesome like garden near the water and write about how we felt in that place.

Cooking so far has been good, people at my house have some really good recipes and I am eating here better than I have in months. I try to help out in the kitchen and later today I will be grilling some tasty burgers and hot dogs.

I love the area, we are really near many beaches and we get to see a lot of the natural beauty of the Cape. We got to go o Woods Hole last week to the Marine Biological Library and we got a glimpse of WHOI and the town.

I am going to end with a couple of pictures from this last week that I just uploaded. I need to go shower cause I just came from jumping into the water off a dock in the park. It was pretty fun and the water was actually kinda warm this time around.

First Day at Woods Hole

So I arrived at WH today. Pretty awesome place. Good beaches (nothing like Salvadorean beaches though)... met some really cool people and played frisbee. I like the little cottage we live in and the classes look interesting. I already have homework for tomorrow, I need to read like 25 pages on boating stuff. I am taking this class called Nautical Science which is like 8.01 (Physics I) and sailing classes combined.

Here are some pics so you guys see the awesome place I am in and the awesome people I am with. However there are some bad news: first is that there are no boats for me to play with... second (and much worse news) is that I am not going to have internet access in the boat... meaning i am going to be out of the blogging business for at least four weeks. I will keep a written diary and hopefully post that online sometime after my trip. It's not gonna be the same but at least I'll let you guys know about my time in the boat. Also I will be sending the link to the boat's twitter feed later on so you can follow our progress through the pacific.

Lastly, it looks like I will be heading back to Boston this weekend (yay!). The BU people want to talk to me about my international status (basically they are doing the whole Arizona deal on me) to make sure I am legally here. Well I'll update you when more interesting stuff happens.