A Quick Turnaround

Last week R/V Sally Ride returned to San Diego after months away. But that doesn’t mean that the ship or her crew got much of a break. Within 72 hours, they were underway again. The summer CalCOFI research cruise will spend 17 days at sea, occupying 75 science stations to collect data as part of its historic data set.  First up, … Read More

Reunited in Newport

This week, two of Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s research vessels – Sally Ride and Roger Revelle – were in Newport, Oregon in order to offload gear. Both Oregon State University and NOAA have wharf facilities on Yaquina Bay, where their own research vessels live, and scientists from those institutions (among others) were aboard the SIO ships. Sally Ride just completed a … Read More

On the East Coast

I recently took a vacation to the East Coast, but couldn’t fully separate myself from R/V Sally Ride. Her sister ship R/V Neil Armstrong participated in New York City’s Fleet Week, so I got to see it as part of the Parade of Ships. It came down from Woods Hole, and lined up with aircraft carriers, destroyers, and other Navy ships to … Read More

March for Science!

“Science is essential for our community, for our world, for our economy. There is a distrust in the objectivity of scientific advice, there’s also a lack of understanding of why it’s useful. This rocks us to our core, those of us who understand and appreciate science. We can’t deny that something fundamental has just changed, and we can’t sit down … Read More

Net Samples Join SIO’s Invertebrate Collection

Scripps Institution of Oceanography is home to some of the preeminent biological and geological collections in the world, which are important repositories for samples from around the planet. On a recent R/V Sally Ride research cruise, biological samples (animals, in this case zooplankton) were collected using two different types of net systems and then sorted for various experiments by scientists onboard. The … Read More

Loading ROV Jason

The CalCOFI cruise ended on a Tuesday, after successful completion of all 75 science stations. We arrived back at the dock before 9am that morning, and the scientists worked to offload their gear right away – everything was back at the labs in La Jolla by lunch time. Beginning the very next morning at 7am, a new group of scientists … Read More

Adventure on the HiSeasNet

R/V Sally Ride underwent many upgrades and additions during the month of October. The most obvious are two huge domes now on the flying bridge (the deck on top of the wheel house) that add uninterrupted satellite internet capability to the ship. Most other ships only have one dome and, depending on the ship’s heading, the signal to it can be blocked by … Read More

Fun with Flags

If you were one of the over 4,500 people who toured R/V Sally Ride in late October, you saw the ship decked out in her finest – red, white, and blue bunting around the railings, with flags from bow to mast to stern. Called dressing, it’s a prescribed setup when showing off a ship for special occasions like a christening, … Read More

WIRED tour and unanswered questions

Scripps Ships Operations director Bruce Appelgate gave WIRED magazine a tour of the R/V Sally Ride while it was docked in San Francisco.  It was done via Facebook Live, so there were a lot of questions asked in the comments. The videos below cover many of them, and more have been covered already in other blog posts, but I’m going … Read More

Making it Official

The christening ceremony for R/V Sally Ride took place back on August 9, 2014. It’s tradition for a ship to be christened (given its name) as soon as it hits the water for the first time – and that a bottle of champagne is broken across her bow as part of the ceremony. This important role was performed by Dr. … Read More