I am home.

By which I now mean “I am in Worcester”.  We are still opening boxes and debating where to put various pieces of furniture, and we have another load to bring down from our storage unit in Portland, but; Sam baked bread this afternoon and our dishes are in the cupboard, so we are more moved in than not. 

I have many yarn-ish thoughts, and have much yarn news to share, but before I get completely sidetracked by thoughts of knitting and dyeing I wanted to share a few photos from my last week in Alaska.  

Dawes Glacier, Endicott Arm Alaska

Buoy coming into Petersburg Alaska, a favorite place for napping. 

Mamma brown bear and three cubs, Glacier Bay, Alaska. July 2015

The face of Johns Hopkins glacier, Glacier Bay, Alaska. (The blobs on the icebergs are seals)

Calving......

Glacier Bay was Friday.  On Saturday I got to go diving again, and amongst many other wondrous things I finally got to see a Giant Pacific Octopus in her den.  I suspect that she was much less excited to see us. 

Back to the Day Job, New Yarn will be Listed Soon (thank you for your patience)

As advertised, I am back in my blue coveralls, at work aboard the Sea Lion.  Returning to the boat requires just as much of a mental shift as returning home does.  I’ve spend the last week pausing every so often to wonder if that thing has always made that sound, and is that rattle new, and does this space normally smell like that?  

Just as I apparently lose the first week home to the couch and my dog, no matter how well I plan or how strong my resolve to do better this time, I lose the last week at home to last minute dyeing/preparing to leave home for six weeks (or eight weeks this time).   This time I lost a whole day during my last week home to a week-earlier-than-I-expected shearing at Buckwheat Blossom Farm, which led to a lovely farm visit and a lot of fleece off to the mill (for my 2015 gansey yarn, and the return of my 3-Ply Coopworth Sport-weight) but also meant that I did not have time to meet up with my mom to give her my new inventory.  So, until my husband can coordinate a trip to Portsmouth,  which will hopefully happen soon, new yarn will remain unlisted.  This is probably a good thing, as the other item on my “to-do” list that I failed to tick off was the whole posting-new-items/newsletter business. I will now be designing a newsletter and posting yarn via the ship’s satellite internet system, which is a bit slow for photos.  I apologize for the delay, and am grateful for your patience. 

To offer a preview: 

I will be offering two yarns, one fingering weight and one slightly lighter fingering weight, both spun from mixed flock of Cotswold and Romney at Liberty Wool Farm in Palermo Maine.  My 3-Ply Cotswold fingering weight yarn is meant to replace the 3-Ply Cotswold x Romney fingering weight yarn of previous years.  I have dyed it two shades of blue, lots of pine green, and a dark gray, as well as leaving a fair amount an undyed natural cream color.  The second yarn is from a group of sheep with slightly more Romney than Cotswold in their lineage (hence the name “Romney > Cotswold” - naming yarns is difficult).  The fleece is a bit shorter and a bit crimpier than the more even Cotswold x Romney fleece, and the resulting yarn has a pleasing smoothness and bounce.  The yarn is spun to a more traditional fingering weight.  These fleeces were mainly mid-brown, and they blended to a dark gray/brown color that I am calling Bark.  Because the undyed yarn is dark, I could only create darker colors when dyeing, but using a darker yarn as my base added quite a bit of depth to the resulting color. I am quite happy with the forest green, dark indigo, deep brown, and oxblood red that the yarn achieved. 

On a slightly more boat related note - while fixing the hinge on the door to the laundry storeroom I noticed this lovely creature keeping one of the stews company.  

My Day Job - Tuesday

I had a lovely idea of writing a serious of posts about a whole week in my day job, and all of the silliness therein, but clearly I write too slowly to carry that off, and anyway I’m home now (I arrived home on the evening of January 25th, just in time for the blizzard) but I managed to write most of the next post before I left the boat, and so I am going to post it anyway.  And even better, now that I am back in the land of reasonable internet, I can include photos. 

Tuesday. 

Still cranky about the previous day, and finding myself with a free few hours in the evening (I usually make repairs to guest cabins during guest mealtimes, but this evening there were no repairs to be made) I decided to rebuild a spare generator raw water pump, at least in part because the “stupid naturalist jerk can’t rebuild a raw water pump” (to put into words the amorphous annoyance that I was still in the grips of). Which is not the most grown-up reaction I will admit, but it was also work that needed to happen, and work that I really enjoy, so I told the deckhands that I’d be down in the engine room in case anyone needed me (deckhands, officers, and engineers all carry hand-held radios with us when we’re working, but I can never hear mine when I’m in the engine room) and set to it. 

This is a raw water pump for one of our generators

So, what on earth is a raw water pump? (Feel free to scroll past this bit)

Your car’s engine is cooled by via the circulation of coolant.  The coolant must in turn be cooled, otherwise it would get hotter and hotter until it was no longer able to cool your engine and your engine would then overheat.  In your car this is done by sending coolant to the radiator, basically a big flat plane that exposes as much coolant at a time to as much air as possible.  For reasons of stability and propulsion, engines rooms on boats are generally as low in the boat as possible and fairly contained.  There is no way to get enough air circulation in most engine rooms to cool the coolant from one engine, let alone the four that we have (two main propulsion engines and two generators).  So instead most marine systems use sea water to cool their coolant.  There are two general ways to do this.  The first involves piping sea water to the marine version of a radiator, referred to as the “heat exchanger”, which is basically a big tank filled with little tubes.  The coolant flows through the little tubes, which are immersed in sea water that is constantly being pumped through before being pumped overboard again, a few degrees warmer than when in started.  The second involves putting a network of little tubes into a protective housing on the outside of the hull, through which the coolant can then be circulated, and cooled as the boat moves through the water.  Both systems have their advantages and disadvantages, and I’m sure there are whole forums devoted to arguing over which system is better for which circumstance, but that is a much longer post.   We have heat exchangers, which means that we also have a pump that pumps sea water past the coolant. When sea water is used for cooling it is often referred to as “raw water”, hence the “raw water pump”.  In our particular situation, the drive shaft of the raw water pump slots into a set of teeth on the coolant pump, and from time to time the teeth on the coolant pump wear down a bit and grind the shaft of the raw water pump smooth, and eventually the raw water pump stops turning, and then the generator engine overheats and shuts down (and then an alarm goes off, the emergency generator kicks on, and the nearest engineer dashes down to the engine room to very quickly start whichever generator was offline at the moment). 

tldr: the drive shaft on our raw water pumps wears down and sometimes needs to be replaced. 

Raw water pump drive shafts, bad and new.  Note how worn the teeth are on the one on the left.  This is not good. 

Rebuilding a raw water pump for a generator is one of those rare utterly satisfying engineering projects, being right in the sweet spot of complicated-but-not-too-complicated, and a-little-messy-but-not-too-messy, and heavy-but-not-too-heavy.  The pump housing is about the size of a cantaloupe, and bronze.  The whole thing weighs about twenty pounds, which is heavy enough to feel like a real project, but not so heavy as to be really annoying.  Replacing the shaft requires also removing the impeller, shaft seal, slinger, lip seal, and the bearing, which in turn is held in place by two snap rings.  Strange tools are required, like snap ring pliers, and a large impeller puller.  And to remove or replace the bearing one must employ a mallet.  

The grabby claw looking thing is an impeller puller.  As I tighten it, I am slowly forcing the shaft to slide out of the bearing. 

In short, rebuilding the raw water pump is as pleasing a craft project as anything I get up to at home.  On a boat it is made even better by the fact that the work bench is on the other side of the water-tight door, in a section of the boat that only engineers, and once an hour during their engine rounds the deckhands, ever enter.  True privacy is almost impossible to find on the boat and the spot by the workbench is the closest to real privacy that I have found on board.  Which meant that while I worked away with my obscure tools, listening to music that I chose, I also danced like a loon.  And sang along.  Loudly (because engines were running, and who was going to hear?).  

And at the end of the evening I had a rebuilt raw water pump, one more item completed on my ever growing ‘to-do’ list, and a restored sense of humor.  I feel incredibly lucky for my day job. 

Eventually I arrived...

After a complicated series of connecting flights, and nearly getting lost in the Orlando Airport, I eventually arrived in Panama City, and a bit longer after that, at the boat I work on, which was docked in Colon. Our trip so far has taken us through the Panama Canal, and up the Pacific coast bound for Costa Rica.

I woke to find us here this morning.

The day before yesterday we were in the Panama Canal:

In between we were a useful platform from which boobies hunted fish.