I went to the awards ceremony, hosted by the Center for Volunteer & Nonprofit Leadership, because I had been nominated by my organization and I wanted to honor the work of the people who had nominated me. I never dreamed I would win because I just take people sailing, which is fun. Who gets an award like this for going sailing?

But I won it. cvnl.org/heart-of-marin/

You know how Hollywood types, when they win an award, gush “this is so unexpected; I have no speech prepared”? And then they launch into a polished acceptance speech, right?

Five hundred people there and I didn’t know what to say.

Wing, Michael R.; Wing, Elizabeth H.; and Al-Jamal, Amin M. (2022) “The Distinctively Basque Stone Shelters of California’s White Mountains,” BOGA: Basque Studies Consortium Journal: Volume 9: Issue 1, Article 4. Available at: https://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/boga/vol9/iss1/4/

It took some time. One thing we haven’t done is to publish where exactly these structures are! We love them and want them preserved.

This happened fast, but now I’m a deckhand on the sailing ship Matthew Turner, albeit unpaid and part-time.  She’s a brand-new wooden brigantine 132′ long.  I’ve been going out on sails ~3 days each week (which is enough!  The deckhand life is exhausting and there’s no alone time on the ship) and showing up for maintenance and summer camp days as well.  The campers go sailing and build ship models in the wood shop. 

When I started I thought we could develop a lot of new oceanography/science activities to do on board but the constraints of a typical half-day cruise quickly became apparent; you can’t make things too complicated.  Early in the cruise the passengers/students/campers are way too interested in the operations of the ship, and later on they’re tired.  So I mostly do plankton tows, marine plastics tows, sail handling and lead sea shantys. 

Haul away you Rolling Kings!
Yeah, that’s right – leading sea shanties is sometimes part of my gig.  You just have to be loud and ham it up; that I can do. I know “South Australia”, “Leave Her Jonny”, “Drunken sailor” and “Cape Cod Girls”.  The format is call-and-response, where I sing a line of two of nonsense at the top of my lungs (it’s very windy out there) and the passengers sing out a refrain like “Heave away!  Haul away!”  “We are bound for Australia”, etc. 

I also collect plankton with a plankton net and put some under the ship’s microscope, which is hooked up to a computer screen so everyone can look at the same time, and teach the basics about plankton.   Sometimes we use a special net for marine micro-plastics called a Manta Trawl.

Sail Handling
There is a LOT of sail handling to be done on this ship and it keeps us all busy for hours.  The square sails have many more lines to control them than the triangular sails.  There are 11 sails on the Matthew Turner (we never set all of them at once) and roughly one hundred identical-looking lines to manage them: sheets, halyards, bunts, braces, topping lifts, outhauls, downhauls, etc., etc.  All these lines come down from the masts and are tied to wooden pins at the rail, and the only way to know which line is which is to memorize its position in the row of pins.  We don’t have set duties – the mate will yell out something like “Hands to set the lower topsail!” and we shout “hands to set the lower topsail!” while moving to the appropriate places at the wooden pins.  On board you always repeat every order.  Whoever jumps to a particular line first gets to handle that line.  But some of the halyards and sheets require three or four people heaving with everything they’ve got.  We let the passengers haul up the mainsail, a long row of people heaving on one line. 

Usually when the ship is doing a maneuver, as soon as you have hauled in or eased a particular line you have to run over to a different place on the deck and do another because every part of every sail needs adjusting.  So in a few minutes there are dozens of lines jumbled up on the deck.  Then you have to coil each one neatly and hang the coil on the wooden pin like it was before.  Everyone is really persnickety about making the coils perfect and symmetrical and all the same size, so I usually have to re-do each coil before it looks good enough.  Then a few minutes later there is another maneuver and we do it all again. 

Going Aloft
Besides matching crew t-shirts, we wear harnesses like the ones rock climbers use.  That’s because in order to furl the square sails several people have to climb up the mast and then lay out onto the horizontal yards (poles) to do the furling.  You stand on one shaky rope, like a slack line, leaning over the yard while pulling the sail towards you, 40-80 feet above the deck.  Another volunteer named Randall taught me how.  You free-climb up the rope ladder (not clipped in ) and once you get to the horizontal yard you clip in with a couple of carabiners.  About fifty feet above the deck there is a little horizontal wooden platform attached to the mast, like a tree fort with no railing.  The platform has two square holes in it that Randall calls “lubber holes”; he says you’re not supposed to climb through them but pull yourself up and around the outside edge of the platform.  You are clipped in during this part.  I went through the lubber hole the first time, but now I do it Randall’s way.

What’s it like working aloft? The other boats on the bay look smaller than toys. It’s like wearing seven-league boots on 100-foot legs. It’s like having a flying dream, if you ever have those. Time stops; you are hyper-focused on each action you do. It’s exhilarating.

Tall Ship Planet
The experience is making me feel like I’m 21 again and the rest of the crew more or less are 21.  They live on board.  They all have experience on other ships. A few are college students who are going back to college in the fall.  The turnover is high for crew on tall ships; a few months to a year is a typical period of time to serve on one.  That’s partly because most tall ships operate seasonally, stopping operations in the winter.  Also because these twenty-somethings are always trying something new.  They are paid $400/week, plus room, board and occasional tips.  I am hoping that I can do this part-time on the Turner for years, and maybe go on some of the longer cruises as time permits.  They have 3-5 day educational sails and even longer trips to Baja in mid-winter. 

Besides the Matthew Turner, the organization has a smaller ship docked next to her called the Seaward, an 82-foot staysail schooner.  She is just as beautiful in her own way as the Turner and probably faster upwind, but since she doesn’t have square sails and isn’t brand-new she isn’t as glamorous and these days the Turner gets all the love.

Old Dog New Tricks
The physical part is not too hard.  Yes, the lines are rough on your hands and you’re always jumping from task to task.  Yes, I was jittery the first time I went aloft, but once I realized there’s no way the harness can let me fall I got over that.  (The captain told me a very wise thing: he said to go halfway up the mast, clip in and then let go and lean backwards with my hands in the air. That’s how I learned you can’t fall when you’re clipped in. ) Yes, a half-day sail somehow becomes a full day when you include all the preparation, cleaning and putting the ship to bed afterwards. 

What’s challenging is the mental part.  It’s being the most inept person on the ship.  It’s being corrected by crew who are younger than your own children but who know more about it: “No, we don’t coil halyards like that.  Let me show you…”  “We never use a locking turn here…”  “ALWAYS stand forward of this cleat…”  There are a million little ways to do things wrong and sometimes it feels like the only way to get them right is to do them all wrong a bunch of times first and get corrected.  So I have to accept that and absolutely leave my 57-year-old-guy ego on shore; that’s what’s difficult.  Never get defensive or justify yourself, just smile, listen, watch, and learn. 

I’m sitting in the Walvis Bay airport, so this is my last post.  I got all  the science done that I needed to do; I hope I come back to this special place some day but science-wise my hypoliths are growing so slowly that I need to wait about ten years.

See you soon in Marin County and Drake High room 414!

So I had to collect some data at my original 2010 Hypolith Array on the Mirabib Road, but nobody was going that way and all the vehicles we had with us were spoken for.  So I wandered up the hill to the Gobabeb Station headquarters and asked if they could help.  Eugene kindly offered me the keys to a Suzuki jeep parked outside.  I kept quiet about my lack of experience driving on the wrong side of the road, shifting gears with my left hand (automatic transmissions are unknown here), or my total ignorance of the use of the 4X4 differential lock!  Also, I had no driving glasses with me.  But, hey what could go wrong?  All I had to do was drive slowly maybe eight miles on a level dirt road with absolutely no other traffic.  So I took the keys and figured out the controls.

The jeep was apparently donated by the Turkish government.  I was alone out there, so of course I took water with me and told Eugene where I was going.  It was great!  Nothing went wrong.  It felt really good to be solitary in the desert after so much togetherness with fifty other scientists.  I found my site, got my data, and was back in little more than an hour.

In the past few days I have had no access to the internet and no time to write until now.  We finished our conference and went camping in the dunes about 20 km south of any road.  Predictably, we had some car trouble but also an awesome sunset.  When we got back the science started.

For the last two days I participated in a west-east transect from the coast to inland sites, collecting soil samples and hypolith samples at points along the way.  In 2012 I had driven along the same road and placed five small sets of “artificial hypoliths” (marble bathroom tiles) to see what grew underneath them.  Now it was time to check.  The western (coastal) two arrays were undisturbed, the farthest west one was well developed, meaning that although the tiles weren’t green yet they had lots of soil strongly adhered to them by polysaccharides (“glue”) secreted by cyanobacteria.  We thing this is the first stage before they turn green.  This site gets a lot of fog, so it’s not surprising that it is the most advanced.

The three inland arrays were all disturbed – the tiles were scattered; not in the positions I left them in.  At one site eleven of the twelve tiles I left there were simply gone – or buried, it’s hard to say.  I think big grazing animals tend to scatter them with their hoofs.  I got some data from what remained, though.

 

It’s evident that these tiles are getting colonized, but it takes much longer than seven years for the cyanobacteria to grow in fully.  I’ll have to come back some day in a decade or so.

 

It’s a magical feeling to come to a totally remote spot somewhere in the world and know that you stood there seven years ago!  And to see the proof; something you left on the ground is still there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Gobabeb Research & Training Centre is mostly a collection of low and unremarkable buildings – except for one.  It’s iconic water tower is visible for miles in every direction.  Water is pumped into the bulbous top of the tower from shallow wells in the (dry) Kuiseb river bed.  From there, the tower provides pressurized water to the Centre.  The water is pure and sweet; not salty at all.  The tower has sort of come to symbolize the station and everything we do here, because isn’t a desert defined by water, or lack of it?  Without the tower we scientists just couldn’t survive here.  The native plants, animals and microorganisms may not have a water tower, but each species has it’s own tricks for collecting and conserving water.

For example, some native beetles here spend hours standing on their heads during early mornings when there is coastal fog.  Water droplets condense on their bodies and run downwards into their mouths.

The conference is over.  Tonight we camp in the dunes.  I’ll try very hard to keep the sand out of my camera, because I need it to collect data.  Tomorrow after we get back from the dunes the fieldwork begins.

I slept through the night and woke up just 45 minutes before dawn – time to climb the Station Dune and see the sun rise over Africa.  It happens so quickly, because we are in the tropics.  The sun just appears to shoot vertically into the sky.

There is lots of beauty, and interesting little animal tracks running all over the dunes; everything from beetles and lizards up to Jackal-sized animals.  They must do this every night.

Today is a day of conferences.  I gave a short talk on Drake High School’s World Wide Artificial Hypolith Project, and heard a lot of others.  Some highlights:  A bird biologist was doing a study on songbirds, weighing them all day long to find out how much body mass they lost from dehydrating.  So how do you weigh wild birds?  The easiest method was to place a tiny meal worm on an analytical balance that was sitting outside in the bird’s habitat.  The bird hops onto the balance to get the worm.  You read the weight while the bird is on the balance.  No need to catch the bird, which takes effort and stresses the bird out.

There was a fascinating talk by JB Raymond on Fairy Circles:  patches of ground in the Namib Desert where a ring of grass has nothing growing in the middle.  JB was able to show that there is a chemical poisonous to plants in the soil inside the circle, but what organism made the chemical, and why, remains to be seen.  Fairy circles haven’t been reported from the California deserts, but I am pretty sure I have seen some somewhere in my home state.  I am going to keep my eyes open for them from now on.

Sometimes hearing a talk reminds you of an idea you already had but forgot.  Brian Jones’ talk mentioned Winogradsky Columns, which are colorful bacteria habitats, and I resolved to build one and use it as a teaching tool in room 414.

There was even a talk on Petrichor, which is the smell of rain in the desert during and after the rainfall.  It turns out it is mostly a compound called geosmin, but which microorganism makes it and when is debatable.

Tomorrow: another half day of conference, then we are going to camp out in the dunes.  It is 40 degrees Celsius here, which is VERY hot. I’m too jet-lagged to figure it out in degrees F, but it feels like over 100.

 

It took a day and a half but I’m safely in Namibia – specifically at the Gobabeb Research and Training Centre, in the Namib Desert, about two hours drive inland from Walvis Bay.   I’m kind of Jet-lagged.  If past experience in any guide I will fall asleep at a normal time but then be wide awake at 3 AM.  Still, it’s great to be back.  I visited this place last in 2012, and before that in 2010.

 

 

 

 

 

 

With me are about fifty scientists from lots of countries – South Africa, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Italy, Denmark, the United States and Israel to name a few – who are all experts on microbes that live in extreme environments.

Tomorrow is a conference.  I will give a talk on my artificial hypoliths project.  Later, fieldwork.  Pretty soon, bed time.  I saw an ostrich today on the way here.

Ten years ago I went to Namibia to start my World-Wide Artifical  Hypolith Project.

Now I’m going back.  I’ll be at the Gobabeb Research and Training Centre in the Namib-Naukluft National Park, in the Namib Desert.  Accompanying me will be 30 or 40 astrobiologists, professors and graduate students from South Africa and around the world.  I hope to move my project forward, with their input and help.

What to pack?  Gotta travel light, but:

Laptop computer with power cable and Ethernet cables,
USB Data stick, South African plug adapter,
Digital camera with battery charger and cable,
Coordinates of my arrays and photo templates,
Drake pennant,
Binoculars, hand lens, compass, global positioning system (GPS) with spare batteries,
Books to read on the plane (I’m thinking African authors like Wole Soyinka, Amos Tutuola and Dinaw Mengestu),
Field notebook, pencils and pens,
Colored pencils and regular pencils as gifts for local school children,
Hat, hiking boots + socks, sunglasses, sunscreen, lip balm, toiletries, bandana, clothes,
water bottle,
PASSPORT, official paperwork, cash (dollars and South African Rand), boarding pass.

I will fly from San Francisco to New York to Johannesburg to Walvis Bay.  It takes about 36 hours to do this.

I will try to post from Namibia April 26-May 6, but internet connection here is always kinda dodgy.