Getting to know the crew

When spending 5 weeks with the same group of people, it's good to learn names!

By Sam Mitchell and Victoire Lucas

Once the shifts kick in, who you interact with, who you see at every meal, and even who you may NEVER crossover with all fall into place. For the science party, we were lucky enough to have a few days on land together prior to setting sail (including a day-long field trip) getting to know each other. Once we arrived on the ship however, our cosy little group of 14 rapidly bumped up to 49! Suddenly, there was a lot of people and a lot of new names, so.... Victoire and I set out on a mission!

Victoire doing the rounds and collecting people's photographs for the roster.

From the recommendation by our Chief Science Officer, Todd, creating a roster of everyone's names, positions and pictures, had served previous expeditions very well for improving "inter-party" relations. As well as our new science party, there were some relatively new members of crew, PSOs and technicians on board, so the exercise would be useful to many on the ship.

I managed to acquire most of our science party photos fairly quickly - they're used to me harassing them for pictures, bio and blogposts by now - but I soon realized that the task loomed of trying to locate and snap everyone else on board! So, with a phone in hand, Victoire disappeared to explore the ship in search of new faces. Within an hour or two, she burst back into the main lab with a gleeful declaration that she had acquired over 20 photos to add to the science party. However, the remaining dozen have taken some more time.

The challenge comes when trying to figure out the schedules of crew members who we have never seen before! Victoire and I are close now, with only a few names remaining (we're starting to question if they're even real!). Hopefully we will soon have a full roster to post in the mess and in the main lab and the name-learning can begin. I mean we could just ASK people their names....but this is a more exciting challenge!