ISA Training Day 26: Preparing Survey Equipment (and also Dima's birthday)

Our vessel has left Busan the day before and we were somewhere in the south of Japan in the morning of October 24, 2018. Ah, yeah. The picture below is not us making handcrafts, but..

We were making a dredging basket (Photo by

If you are wondering for what purpose, it's actually one of our equipment for the deepsea mineral exploration. The equipment is called rock dredger. As the name implied, it's for dredging rocks.

This is the rock dredger (image from Vladimir)

Okay. At that day, I did my presentation about country. Later that day, Dolo presented her work. During my presentation, I explained everything about Indonesia. Started with its geography: how wide Indonesia is, how it is located between two continents and two oceans, and how big the number of its islands. Continued with its people: how big the number of its population, how big the number of its ethnics and languages, how this big number in its ethnics and languages can be put together using one lingua franca: Bahasa Indonesia. Continued with how the diversity of its flora and fauna, and how beautiful Indonesia is, so that Indonesia is one of country with many tourism destinations. Ended with its cuisine: how spicy the Rendang Beef is, how delicious the satay is, and how popular Indomie is. At the end of the presentation I brought out the Indomie goreng cups I prepared before and gave them for everyone to try.

This is me doing my presentation about Indonesia (photo by Yuriy)

After my presentation, Chief scientist for this survey, Vladimir Ivanov, explained about our survey plan at Guyot Alba on Magellan Seamount, West Pacific. At that time, we were discussing about a work shift. Each trainee was given an option to choose two shift each day with one shift is four hours long.

Here's our chief scientist, Vladimir, were explaining about our survey plan (Photo by me).

I chose the first shift at 8AM to 12PM in the morning and 8PM to 12AM in the evening. The shift is accompanied by three scientists: Vladimir, Tatyana, and Sergey. In the morning shift, I took it with my fellow trainee, Amina. In the night shift, I did it with Isuri.

Here's the complete list of our shifts. The middle column is scientist team that accompanied the trainees in the right column (Photo by me).

At that day, we also prepared something for Dima's birthday. His birthday was at the next day. I am still amazed how well we prepared for Dima's birthday (although most of them were prepared by scientist team). Our participation was making birthday note card. It was big card that we could put our photos and our notes there.

Here's the cool birthday note card! Look at that "Goodbye, Busan!" and "Welcome to Panama!" detail on the bottom part! Person on the picture starting from the top clockwise: Kira, Sasha, Me, Dolo, Jose, Tatyana, Yuriy, Isuri, Sergey, Georgiy, Amina, Anatoliy, Bia, Vladimir, and in the middle is the birthday guy: Dima. (Photo by me)

And here's some birthday greetings for Dima: