Almost half the trip's over, and finally my first small boat outing this time! Yes yes, I know everyone's thoroughly bored with posts on my small boat trips on which nothing really seems to happen except me being actually off the Trident and still in the middle of nowhere... But you would have to live on a ship for half the year to appreciate the fabulousness of the mere possibility of being off the ship!! (And in case you do live on a ship, you would have to be me :P.)
What was most glaringly obvious for every moment of the 2 hr. trip was that the Sun in a clear sub-tropical sky is a rather painfully bright thing. :| And when you are heading towards sunlight, being the lookout on the bow can be a dodgy task, to put it mildly. But if you keep your eyes off the distant and firmly on the immediate bit ahead, the deep blue with here and there a pool or sudden sharp edge of bright gold will dazzle you momentarily, then get smashed into many many tiny bits of perfect white by the prow. One of those small joys of my life that I choose to enjoy and remember in vivid detail rather than ignore as insignificant. Makes this life so much happier :).
At that close distance you can almost feel the salty sea. And then of course the boat would tumble into a deep trough and you'd be drenched so thoroughly that even if you don't want to, you'll definitely taste the salt water :D. Good thing I took my cam in a water-tight zip-loc bag! Of course, the other option would have been to leave it on-board, but by now pretty much the entire seismic crew knows that I'd much rather ditch my life-jacket than my cam on a small boat trip :P.
But when the huge flying-fish went whizzing past me, scales flashing deep blue and emerald green in the intense sunlight, I was thankful for the bright day. It's quite a surprised to see the rather ordinary looking silvery fish turn into such a brilliant thing! And this was a particularly big one, at least 8 inches long!! Okay, so that isn't exactly gigantic, but believe me, compared to most of the flying fish around here, it was b-i-g!! Then I had to spend a minute frantically looking for the chase boat we were heading towards, but had disappeared in the hyper-bright sunlight reflected in the sea. Funny how things can get hidden 'cos of light :).
Feeling: happy :)
Listening to: Radiohead - My iron lung
What was most glaringly obvious for every moment of the 2 hr. trip was that the Sun in a clear sub-tropical sky is a rather painfully bright thing. :| And when you are heading towards sunlight, being the lookout on the bow can be a dodgy task, to put it mildly. But if you keep your eyes off the distant and firmly on the immediate bit ahead, the deep blue with here and there a pool or sudden sharp edge of bright gold will dazzle you momentarily, then get smashed into many many tiny bits of perfect white by the prow. One of those small joys of my life that I choose to enjoy and remember in vivid detail rather than ignore as insignificant. Makes this life so much happier :).
This bird, white wings spread out against the light blue sky. Beyond the reach of the salty spray of the deep blue sea that tries to lap at it. Gliding... swooping... soaring...
It's a funny thing, the ship's pitching and rolling. Eventually you do get used to it. And when the visual proof of the horizontal, i.e. the horizon, is removed (as it was tonight, with no moon and the stars blotted out by clouds), you don't even notice it upto a point! The distant flashes of lightning (couldn't hear the thunder over the hydraulics and the engines n stuff) jerking about erratically gave me a bit of a surprise. And I needed the swinging lights of a nearby ship to confirm that I was the one moving, not the sky. What's even more interesting is that it's much more difficult to ignore the movement indoors than out on the back-deck!
So clouds are back in the sky and drilling platforms around the horizon.
