Explore "David Goes Voyaging" by David Binney Putnam on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Soon after dawn each day one of the crew washes the decks. And it seems only a short time later that Willie, the German mess boy calls "Hallf pass seex. " I jump out of my cot on the upper deck, put on shorts, shirt and sneakers and beat it for breakfast at seven o'clock.
Just after breakfast or just before, the temperatures are taken and samples of water brought up from the different depths of the ocean. When that is finished, the depth of the ocean is measured. This is called "sounding. " A heavy lead weighing seventy-five pounds is let over on a piano wire till bottom is reached. Of course the ship's engines have to be stopped while this is going on. The sounding machine has a contraption for bringing up samples of the sea bottom, so that one knows if there is sand or mud or rock below. Our soundings have varied from 746 fathoms to 2070 fathoms. A fathom is six feet.