Furry Wombat

No diving today, so I scooted out to the bow of the ship this morning to practice.   Although the ship is large (224 ft), you still feel the rocking of our currently calm seas.  The bow isn’t the most stable part of the ship (that would be the fan tail), but it is the loneliest and smells the least of diesel.   The ship is a rather male-centric environment, so it’s best to find a lonely spot before doing crazy yoga poses that might attract attention.

Boat yoga is a little like yoga for pregnant ladies — you have to keep your feet a bit wider. In samasthi and throughout the standing sequence where you would normally have your feet together or aligned, on the boat, I keep mine a few inches apart. In vinyasa, sometimes the boat rolls you into urdhva mukha svanasana or adho mukha svanasana , and sometimes you have to overcome the roll to get there. Utthita hasta padangusthasana requires a hand for balance.  Low arm balances are, curiously, not a problem: bakasana, titibhasana A are still solid.  High arm balances are tricky:  I tried pincha mayurasana with moderate success,  handstands felt a little scary, and I didn’t bother with karandavasana, which still needs work even on terra firma.   Kapotasana and standing backbends were fine, at least in the easy seas we have right now.

With all the experiment planning, the most difficult part of practice is the spinning mind — this is the same as home, of course.  But, perhaps, worse because of all the protocols and scenarios running through my head.  Being out here is a huge investment in people, time, and resources (the ship costs ~$10000/day to run) so I want stuff to work!  Tomorrow, we will launch a small dive boat off the big boat, go to the site where we deployed an instrument two days ago, carefully anchor (avoiding any coral damage in the protected area), deploy a corded instrument from the boat to the dive site, and run a bunch of experiments.  It’s all a little crazy and exciting, and has lots of details.  Lots and lots of details for me to worry about and so my mind spins…. today it was running around about anchoring scenarios.

But, if all goes well, my mind has mellowed by the end of practice.   Maybe I should get in at least the sun salutes even on dive days…   I suspect the rest of my team might appreciate it.

Mokumanamana is where light and darkness meet, where the living and dead intermingle. The entrance to Po, where mana is strong. This last high island before the volcanoes descend into atolls is the Hawaiian River Styx. A monk seal greets us here. Boobies, frigates, terns, and petrels abound, and their excrement enriches the land, the sea, the air.

A successful day in the field; a day where experience mattered a little, and I had some. This still surprises me. Here’s what we did:

We also saw a little crabby friend.

The cliff face of west Nihoa plunges into the water with an iron-red stain. Perhaps the red stain gives the water its shade of royal purple-blue. Not much coral here: cauliflower heads and small polyp patches on large basalt boulders that get rolled enough by passing storms to prevent larger, slower growing corals. Bright four-spot and ornamented butterflies wander through the high relief with hole-peeping blennies, pursed-lipped chubs, and square-jawed emperors.

The push and pull of waves overhead overwhelms our effort at staying still. Here, stillness is to acquiesce to the movement of the water. Of course, we push against the stillness: we have work to do. Work on hypotheses that, in the blue face of nature, are clearly oversimplified by too much time in the lab, in front of the screen. It’s all foolishness, even when the experiment works.