We have been on board one week and time has changed its meaning. The first three days dragged on like an endless finals week of confusion, anxiety, frustration, and sleep deprivation. I felt a little like those dreams where you have a test and you haven’t studied, but everyone expects you to know the answers anyway, and, oh yeah, also, you’re naked. After those first three days, though, I started to settle into a rhythm, got the feel for the watch rotations, line handling, lab work and time started to speed up. Three days now melt into one because of the rotating watch. Every three days we see one sunrise, one noon, one sunset, one midnight. We sleep in little blocks, around 4 hours so it seems like naps, like we’re just always awake. What an odd feeling of simultaneous disorientation and groundedness. You wake up and it’s dawn, afternoon, midnight; you wake up and it’s sunny, raining, warm, cold; you wake up and you are exactly where you were when you went to sleep and yet miles and miles away from that place at the same time. Max put it well when he said at dinner, “it feels like we’ve been on the ship a day…and an eternity.”
Ok, ok, enough with the rambling musings and back to the nitty-gritty of every-day life. Today was sail handling day. There is still very little wind and we were sailing only under the mains’l, but in order to stop the ship’s motion for science deployment, we have to set sail and heave her to. So we set the mainstas’l, forestays’l and jib, deployed the hydrocast, then struck all the sails, including the mains’l and furled them. 
It always saddens me to see this beautiful ship with no sails set because as much work as sail handling was in the first few days, I have really come to enjoy it. But the weather remains wonky and the normally stationary north Pacific high pressure system is nowhere to be found, so it looks like we will be under power for a while yet.
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And while we're on the subject of sail handling, here's another shanty I like
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