Wickersham's Conscience

R/V Acona, c. 1965

WC alluded to this minor event earlier. The story may not be suitable for every reader. You’ve been warned.

In the summer of 1967, it was WC’s great privilege to work as a deck technician on the Institute of Marine Science’s R/V Acona. The Acona was the University of Alaska’s first real research ship, and 1967 was probably her third year of operation for UA. WC worked six hours on/six hours off for a variety of scientists on a variety of cruises over the course of three months. After getting over seasickness, it was truly a lot of fun.

A deck technician on a research ship is the junior most person aboard. They are the ones who get the water and mud samples – not running the winches, strictly a crew responsibility – but attaching the gear to the cables, managing the water-sampling Nansen bottles and mud samples, running the bathothermographic runs and between stations doing the wet lab work. In rough water, and we saw 25-foot waves that summer, it was a cold, wet business. The sampling station – the “Hero’s platform” – stuck nearly three feet off the starboard rail, so when the ship rolled, you got dunked.

The Acona in those days was 80 feet long, 40 feet wide and an enthusiastic roller. In really rough water, you got dunked chest deep. Or waves simply came over the top of you. But mostly it involved careful, fairly meticulous clamping and unclamping of sample bottles and bear trap bottom samplers to a 3/8ths inch cable. A fair amount of dexterity was involved; you couldn’t really wear gloves.

Whatever was in the water would come up draped over the cable and the samplers. There were dense blooms of jellyfish at some stations, but your hands got toughened by all that cold saltwater, so that most of the jellyfish stings were more like mild itches. After a few days, you forgot about them entirely.

After a couple of weeks, WC was actually getting pretty good at his duties, and didn’t mind saying so. WC might have even been annoying.

The Acona had saltwater heads. No point in wasting freshwater. The Crew Chief, WC’s boss, mentioned that it you used the urinal with the lights off, you could see the dying plankton fluoresce when you did your business. WC had been drinking a lot of tea on the graveyard shift. The Crew Chief mentioned that morning, towards the end of the shift, that the plankton were unusually dense so, between stations, WC flipped off the lights in the men’s head and checked out the fluorescence.

There wasn’t any, of course. What there was were hands covered in live jellyfish tentacles, richly equipped with stinging  nematocysts, handling a very, very sensitive part of a guy’s anatomy. It was excruciating.

So there was WC, stumbling around in the pitch dark head, trying to find the light switch, making some distinctly unmanly noises, desperate to rinse off what was hurting. And at exactly that moment, the door to the head was opened and there was the entire ship’s crew, solemnly applauding my performance. For a seventeen year old high school student, it was about as bad as it gets.

Happily, the cook had a rag soaked in vinegar, which solved the immediate problem. It really does work quickly. But the lesson went a lot further than dealing with jellyfish slime. Somewhere about that time, WC got over the worst of his teenage smart aleck behavior. WC would also like to think he was a better shipmate from that point forward.

WC’s readers are much smarter than WC. So you don’t need WC to warn you about the perils of arrogance, Or the importance of washing your hands. . .