The next level

I am now a fully checked-out level-III dive boat tender.

And though I may have learned how to drive small boats and administer O2 to divers in trouble, all the sunny weather this weekend kept me from doing any actual work towards the completion of my research project.  Completion?  What am I talking about?  Aside from having detected an internal bore in the outgoing tide in the acoustic data, the significance of which I cannot even begin to describe because I don’t know, I really have no idea how to approach my research other than as the lowly uneducated fraud that I am, collecting more of exactly the same kind of data that has been being collected for the past two years and reporting back on my barest findings.  It’s all I’m qualified to do!  I’m staving off panic about my total lack of research experience, or even classroom experience in fields relevant to the project by having more fun than I’ve ever had in my life stuck on an island a thousand miles from home with a bunch of strangers.  And by telling myself that even if I had taken an ecology class, most of the material wouldn’t apply to what we’re researching now and the stuff that did apply I’d have to learn all over again because I would have forgotten it since passing my final.  But I still feel under-equipped because you never know what bits of learning are going to come in handy in the future, and even if they’ve been forgotten, at least you know where to go looking when you want them back.  It’s just those bits I sense I’m lacking when I’m trying to get a sense of where to look for questions in the water column that might amount to better answers than “The water got colder towards winter.  There was more fresh water when the wind was blowing from the north.  South station has higher salinity than North station.”  I keep on getting just to the edge of where I might start to find a way to understand how they all fit together and then it just slips from view again.  I’ve taken oceanography, but we never covered multi-layered mixing in channels with sills.  I’m climbing mountains of fluid dynamics publications, theoretical water physics, and that one switchback around which I’ll see some kind of view of where I’ve come from is always just a few steps ahead.  I’m not getting discouraged though.  Flashes of near-understanding are coming to me frequently enough to keep me climbing.  I hold on to my faith that my scientific incompetence will not be found out before I have a chance to correct it.  Meanwhile, there are always hot divers for me to chat with while I’m boat tending.   Amorous though I am not, the sight of a brilliant scientist vegetarian grinning on the dock, with his wet suit stripped down to his waist, rinsing his hair with the freshwater hose on a rare sparkling sunny afternoon never fails to get me flustered and grinning right back.