As we bring this second season of Nautilus Live to a close, it’s difficult to sum up a season’s worth of discoveries in a single blog. So many different crews have been together since Nautilus set sail in July that none of them have had the same experiences or come back with the same memories. Everyone has a different highlight reel to play for themselves, whether it’s from a FLIPcam, an iPhone, stills from a digital camera or, best of all, the images that are only in our heads. We get to play with the latter kind, sharpening or fading them with time, as we move on to our next gig, our next task, our next mission - our next life.

 

We do all have other lives, of course, and at the end of a long expedition, what comes next is often what comes sooner than expected. Yesterday you were in the middle of the ocean, with only your few shipmates and blue as far as the eye could see in every direction. Tomorrow (with a few exceptions) you’ll be on a plane, heading out to meet your friends, family, students, pets, loved ones, and the reality of a world that neither appears to move beneath your feet during the day, nor rocks you to sleep at night.

 

So rather than reminiscing about our time together and the things we have seen, we instead look ahead to where our paths take us next, after some well-deserved time with family:

 

Three members of the team will return to Rhode Island, where it all begins, and continue the year long task of demobilization, refitting, repair, data logging and preparation that goes into setting out again next summer – Dwight, Brennan, and Matt will take a short break and get right back to work at the University of Rhode Island (URI) – you’ll far more likely find them in the ROV shop than out shopping on Black Friday. Matt is looking to buy a house and Brennan recently got engaged, so that will take up their spare time for a good while (Dwight never has any spare time to begin with).

 

Many will take a quick breath and get right back to where they were before embarking – Brian is off to New Hampshire, where the company he owns contracts with Boston Garden, Gillette Stadium, and Fenway Park to engineer the video coverage of games of all types, and will build satellite trucks for TV stations in Massachusetts and Manhattan (if they win the bid); Liz gets right back to her research at the University of New Hampshire, and writing grants to fund her continued work with invertebrates; Sam heads to his girlfriend’s in West Virginia for Thanksgiving and then returns to Philadelphia and the lab at Temple University where he’s studying lophelia coral; Sarah goes to Colorado to do more work with the Aspen Institute for Environmental Studies (although she’ll also take a few months’ data work for Nautilus back with her); Sharon and I will make our way back to our classrooms in Las Vegas, NV and New Haven, CT, respectively, where our eager students await us with many questions about our escapades.

 

Others continue down their paths with new ventures of one sort or another. Here’s a small sample:

 

Gregg will live in the moment a while longer, looking for the next thing, the new gig, the sought-after position. In the meantime he’ll make his way to Florida after his time aboard, the life of an independent contractor taking him where it will, once he regroups, recharges and returns to the fray. Maybe to the Pacific, maybe the Gulf – it’s impossible to know – but his unique skill sets make him qualified to do so much that an uncertain future doesn’t necessarily mean an uncomfortable one.

 

Hannuman took the job aboard Nautilus before he had time to fully pack and prepare to move from Houston, so he dropped his dog off with a friend in Atlanta for safekeeping while he spent his time at sea. He’ll return to Georgia to pick up his dog, fly him to Rhode Island on a pet airline that allows the pets to fly in the main cabin (with their own flight attendant!), then bring everything to URI, where he now begins work full-time as an Oceanographic Data Engineer for the Institute for Exploration at the Inner Space Center.

 

Jamie always has a million things to do, so the next two months of his schedule, during which he’ll be in Texas for a couple of days, Martha’s Vineyard for a few more, then back to Austin for less than a week, off to a meeting, back for a week, and finally to the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco, is really the same old same-old. He finally settles down during the spring semester at the University of Texas, where he’ll also coordinate a workshop (funded by the Lounsbury Foundation) to plan a future season of NautilusLive.

 

Jeff will not fly home, but meet his family in Switzerland (where he has an uncle in Zurich) for a week of time together in Europe before returning to Cape Cod to take charge of OceanQuest, a non-profit that provides hands-on marine science education to students of all ages.

 

Nairooz will quickly resume her studies at the Leon Charney School of Marine Sciences (she’s been missing classes the whole time we’ve been at sea), where she’ll soon write a proposal for her Master’s thesis in Wave Research/GeoArcheology – she’ll be using archeology to help date the geology of the areas on which she is doing her research.

 

Oded is between places to live, looking for an apartment, some of his belongings at his parents’ house, yet in the midst of it all, going back to Haifa University to parse the data we have collected and meticulously enter it all into the maps he created from last year’s mission. Figuring out what we’ve just seen after we’ve seen it will be his next few months’ journey.

 

Roderick will head home to his family in London, with lots of other projects hanging fire, but first he’ll write up a full upgrade of the NautilusLive Navigational Instruction Manual/ Standard Operating Procedures. He’s been working on it all summer long, and with most of it in his head right now, it needs to be written down. He’ll also stay current with new navigational tools and software/rules & regulations, reading up on new developments, and making a software program that will help automate the navigation process for the next voyage.

 

 

While we all begin our next voyages, be they a continuation of the past or the dawn of a new era in our lives, our paths have now been eternally intertwined in this adventure, some of them to return with the inevitability of the tides to be further entangled, others to be spread upon the winds that so recently blew us into port, but which now blow us all forward into unseen moments, on the edges of our seats. Riveted once more.