The rejuvination of my career as a marine biologist.

It is also the first post from Chile and a ´nueve entrader´ but I´m afraid I´m too behind in updates!

On the evening of the naked mole rats with which I left you I got a text from Alta asking if I could come out on the boat with her again since some other people had dropped out. Despite the fact that I knew I would feel differently once the sea-sickness set in I readily agreed!

The day everything went wrong:

3.30am: Wake up. Wish I´d gone to bed earlier.
6am: Alta finally arrives 30minutes late.
It turns out Alta hasn´t slept having been up all night making decoys. The phrase "I really shouldn´t be driving does nothing to reassure me. We drive through Simon´s town but the pharmacy isn´t open yet and the shop doesn´t do motion sickness tablets.
When we get to the harbour Alta realises that one of the small keys for the two motors is no longer on the keychain. Damn. We look around futilely. We go to check the boat and get it ready (somewhat optimistically I felt but aparently we can work on one motor). While using a rope to let myself down to the small row-boat we use to get to the bigger boat and have to perform a stretch which proves too much for the crotch of my rather inflexible waterproof trousers. They now have a huge tear in them - but I decide this may be an improvement in terms of climbing ability; I can also now sit in an unladylike fashion with my legs apart. Alta fails to find the key in the boat. I go ask some random navy people. Also futile.

By this time it was getting light. Most predations happen early when the sun is low making the silhouettes of the seals more easily visible from below. We could have gone out on one motor but by the time we got out there we’d have missed most of the predations anyway, so Alta decided it was more important to get the key copied (since the one we had fit both engines). The reason for this was that the priority of the day was to get onto Seal Island which would require another skipper and preferably two working motors. We were going to collect the skipper George, and Alta’s supervisor Justin, and then Alta and Justin were going to get onto the island to get two months worth of data from a box which recorded the presence or absence of tagged seals. We were supposed to be picking the others up around 10am and getting back around lunchtime, so we had time to go off and get the key copied first.

We tried about three different places nearby, none of which could make a copy of the unusual boat key. The up-side to all this driving was that I was able to find a pharmacy and purchase some motion-sickness pills! At some point during all this we had a call from Justin – skipper George couldn’t make it. No matter, said Justin, he could drive the boat; I think his phrase was “How hard could it be?”.
So finally, a key, motor and skipper short, we set off towards Seal Island. The tourist boats which come to watch the shark acrobatics had gone so there was just us and an interested looking marine police boat. Now Seal Island is basically a big flat rock covered almost entirely in seals and a flock of cormorants. Can they be a flock when they’re sitting down? Anyway, they kept to their own little patch away from the seals. Oh, and I also spotted a couple of penguins! I think they were Jackass penguin, which is actually the new name for African penguins; the other kind they had at the aquarium were Rockhopper penguins.

So, this rock is inconveniently lacking any sort of pier, harbor, slipway or any kind of sandy beach. We drove round it a couple of times looking at the large slippery-looking sides against which the waves were crashing. In a probably illegal manner, Alta taught Justin to drive the boat, then we waited for the marine-police people to get bored and leave, and picked a nice looking rock. Alta stood at the front of the boat with a backpack containing a plastic bag of useful/expensive equipment including the laptop for downloading the data. Justin drove the boat slowly towards the rock, freaking out the mass of seals in the water in front of us. At the moment that the boat started bumping into the rock, Alta stepped carefully off and Justin hit reverse. Alta was safely on the island!

We drove off to a distance and watched Alta slowly edge towards a grey structure in the middle of the island with some solar panels and a light on top. She had to move a few steps at a time then wait for all the alarmed seals to lumber out of the way. The entire flock of cormorants took flight and started circling the island repeatedly, like a storm with Alta in the centre. While she reached the computer and started opening it up and fiddling, Justin and I sat on the bobbing boat chatting. The sea-sickness tablets worked amazingly – it was brilliant! Alta took a looong time. We discussed naked mole rats, annoying teenagers, and whether I was any good at genetics (answer no, although apparently there is a PhD waiting to be done on the baboon genetics; Justin is also Tali’s supervisor). I was perched happily on the inflated side of the boat (less than a meter above the surface) when Justin looks behind me at some seagulls circling the water and says “I think there’s a shark there”. Even as I got up (rather quickly) and turned round, an enormous Great White appeared in the water a couple of meters away. We had a beautiful view as it circled and swam right under the boat – we even caught a glimpse of its teeth! Justin was as excited as I was, laughing when I jumped away from the side and exclaiming “you owe me a sandwich!”. He certainly had food on the brain, having been disappointed to find out that Alta had not brought lunch.

Alta really was taking a long time – it was getting past lunchtime. All the seals had stopped being freaked out and had filled in the gap. When she finally returned, she didn’t have the data; apparently the solar panels weren’t charging the machine and there wasn’t enough juice for the download.

There followed many technical discussions (once we’d managed to avoid waves coming from two directions and get Alta on the boat again). A plan was formulated by which Justin would carry the ridiculously heavy battery from the non-working motor to the island. We found a new, less wave-battered rock to use as a stepping stone; it was also covered in mussels providing more grip. His jump onto the island was accompanied by a painful-sounding scraping of hull against mussel-shells. He went, connected up the battery, and came back. As Alta steered the boat in a wave pushed as sideways away from the rock, so she decided to go in for another try, but Justin didn’t seem to want to wait and leapt across the bow ending up sprawled across the front end of the boat. While more technical discussions were taking place I split the remains of a small bar of chocolate between us and guiltily consumed my one cheese sandwich. Alta hopped back onto the island to reattempt the download, preferably finishing before the swell/waves increased which was forecasted to come in at around 5pm. Once again she was gone a looong time. I saw spray in the far distance across False Bay and caught a glimpse of a whale body pushing out of the water and crashing back in. We saw some dolphins, presumably herding a school of fish since a group of seagulls turned up and started diving into the water.

Justin was really frustrated not knowing what was happening and worrying about the potential loss of two months of data; he kept saying “she’s taking too long!” and running through the various possibilities in his head. Somehow all the mobile phones had ended up in bags on the island which was not so helpful. When it got to the point where Justin was considering swimming I finally said (somewhat redundantly) “Do you want to go?” and persuaded him to let me maneuver the boat. How hard could it be?

I’m sure you’re all expecting some disaster story now but I’ll have you know my first ‘command’ as a boat Captain was a great success! My steering skills were wonderful if I do say so myself. I sat in the boat by myself drifting away and having to steer back to the island every so often. Five o’clock came and went without the advent of huge thunderous waves and my excellent piloting skills were able to retrieve Alta and Justin and the equipment successfully from the rock! The retrieved battery didn’t appreciate all the jumping about and started leaking acid into the backpack, dissolving the back of Justin’s water proof trousers. Other than that it was all a success!

On the way back we saw more dolphins who couldn’t keep up with us, and the back of what was presumably a Southern Right whale quite close by. I would have liked to stop for a look but the sun was setting, Justin had missed his 3 o’clock meeting and no-one had eaten properly all day.

When we got back the harbor Justin skedaddled off back home and Alta and I put the boat away in the dark. Alta managed to drop her keys off the side, necessitating a rope-assisted clamber down into the little boat in order to retrieve them (the keychain has useful floaty part) in the pitch black. It seemed that after successfully obtaining the data (which I may have forgotten to mention in the midst of extreme exaggeration regarding boating skills) our bad luck felt the need for some vengeance. While steering the big boat (aka the rubber duck) out of the bay towards the buoy in the dark, Alta hit a piece of metal on the side and punctured one of the inflatable sides of the boat. Not good. Although that was our last mishap for that day, the harbor master called Alta a few days later to tell her that the boat had capsized. The last I heard Alta and Justin had rescued the boat and were trying to dry out the engines – so fingers crossed!

I got back to the flat that evening after 8pm, some 14 hours after I’d left. It was a long day; and a long story! I’ll spare you details of BBQing, drinking too much wine and saying goodbye, and leave my adventures in South Africa there!