The first student cruise I ever taught while being taught by one of the greatest teachers myself.

As you might have noticed from the last four or so blog posts, I really enjoy teaching student cruises and I think they are a super important part of the oceanography education.

So let me tell you about the first student cruise I taught. I was lucky enough to co-teach it with one of the most experienced and knowledgeable oceanographers out there, who was excited about sharing with me all there is to know about cruise planning, cruise leading, teaching at sea and many other topics.

Me and Anne on watch during that student cruise. Picture courtesy of Angus Munro.

From the first day of the first cruise onward, my ideas and contributions were welcomed, and I got to heavily influence the scientific program of the cruise. On the second day of the first cruise, I was told to just walk up to the captain and tell him if I wanted to change the course and go measure somewhere else than planned.

On the bridge, discussing the scientific plan for the next day. Picture courtesy of Angus Munro.

The cruise ended up being great learning experiences for me. For the first time, I got to decide how to allocate ship time to best investigate the question that I thought was most interesting, a topic that I had never had (the chance) to deal with previously.

Getting the small boat ready to recover a mooring. Photo courtesy of Angus Munro.

At the same time, I had the opportunity to learn from – and work with – the best. One of the practical highlights: A mooring release had not been working reliably in the past, but it was the one that we had with us on this cruise. So what to do?

Recovering a mooring. Photo courtesy of Angus Munro.

Easy! Just tie a rope from the mooring to a tree! (Ok, so maybe this isn’t generally helpful, but if you are in Lokksund, this is genius)

And then I got to spend a lot of my time on watch (and a lot of my time off watch) discussing what we were seeing in the new data, what we could learn from that, where we should go next to prove or disprove our new theories.

And I got to watch a great teacher interact with his students (other than me). I saw how he challenged, how he encouraged, how he helped, how he guided, how he inspired.

Bringing the mooring back on deck. Photo courtesy of Angus Munro.

Thank you so much, Tor, for being the role model you are and for having given me all of this, which I have since been striving to give to my own students.

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All photos in this post were taken by Angus Munro (thanks!) on the 2012 GEOF332 student cruise.