Before going to sleep last night, I looked ahead at our tentative schedule to be sure I knew what was up and I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. We are doing CTD, followed by CTD, followed by CTD, etc., etc.
However, the schedule has been wonky from the beginning, subject to change and I wasn’t sure before this cruise exactly what we were doing. So when I woke up to discover that I had a whole day of gravity coring ahead of me. I believed it. Gravity coring is something I have seen done, but not actually directed. I started asking for advice and confirmations. I was searching the ship for all the parts required that I wasn’t sure we had. I was also trying to orchestrate a relocation of the giant multi-core sitting right in the middle of the deck.
I got lots of advice. The captain gave me tips regarding wire angle that made no sense, so I kinda just filed it away for later. One of the scientists came to me while I was digging through a box of coring parts and asked if I liked him. I told him “That depends on how much you know about gravity coring.”
“I just wanted you to know, that it’s April Fool’s day and I told my students we found a puppy floating on the sediment trap this morning.” I honestly believed that he was asking me to participate in his own April Fool’s day joke. He also tried to tell me that there was no more core liner on board when I went into our container forward to look for it, as a hint, that maybe we weren’t going to do all that coring.
I instead replied with, “Did you check in the container?”
As soon as I got to the bow of the ship, and opened the container doors to discover there was, in fact, no core liner, I was called on the radio by the captain. He informed me my counterpart had found it by the rad van and we were fine.
So I get to the stern and there is a large group assembled on the deck. The multi-core still firmly secured to the deck where I had left it with instructions to be relocated. I cursed that still to be done. I went straight to the rad van and nope no core liners.
I turned around to face the group on deck and I hear “April Fools!”
My response? “I didn’t think there were any on deck, but there aren’t any in the container either.”
The captain rests his hand on my shoulder and says, “No, there won’t be any gravity cores.”
I threw my eyes up to the top of the A-Frame and breathed a massive sigh of relief, while trying to control my rage. I was reminded by another how much love went into orchestrating a prank that size. Half the science party and half the deck crew were involved in it, orchestrated by my counterpart. I no longer had an afternoon of gravity cores so my day got immensely lighter and I realized someone had tried to warn me. It was definitely well done.
I wasn’t the only one who fell for it either. There were scientists all over the ship grumbling that their CTD casts were delayed until tomorrow.
May your crew love you enough to try pulling one on you today.
<3
