A week on board Celtic Explorer is hard work for the scientists hunting a toxic organism and a colourful retreat for poet Mary O'Malley.
At 4pm one Saturday in July a group of 13 scientists from four countries board Celtic Explorer at Galway docks. They will remain aboard until Monday of the following week. This cruise, which for me is a cross between a monastic retreat and a crash course in marine biology, will be hard work for the scientists.
At 9pm the engines rev slightly. There is a barely perceptible jar as we negotiate the tiny space inside the dock gates, then the ship slides easily as a reptile through the gates and out into the bay. The view from the bridge is high and wide. This is Galway as I have never seen it.
Through the week, their inevitable small conflicts and civilised negotiations ebb and flow around me. From the off, there is great activity in the laboratories, as the teams gets the instruments in place. There are exclamations over small items forgotten or lost, remedies found. In this high-tech lab, it is comforting to know that sometimes a humble water bottle or a stray metal washer can save the day.
The watches are organised by Dr Robin Raine of NUI Galway, chief scientist and co-ordinator. At least one team works through the night, every night. The hunt is on for microscopic Dinophysis, in a thirty million pound ship, built like the ultimate boy's toy.
Outside, the sea slides by. The ship is almost silent. A gentle roll as we slip down the Clare coast. I sleep deeply, held in the slight roll, before waking at 6.30am. We are travelling fast, islands rapidly slipping by, high, medium, low. The Blaskets look benign in this early light. At 7.15am a grey gull. The porthole curves the horizon, or accentuates and makes visible what is there. Brandon is behind us, the Navigator's mountain. It is impossible not to think of the monks, the altar and the forest of masts under the surface of the ocean. They went this way without compass or sextant, diving, in Heaney's words, " . . . into the marvellous . . . ".
The real wilderness, the 220 million acres of uncharted territory that is still Ireland, is beneath us and ahead. For most of our journey the sea will be rat-skin grey, but I do not share Wallace Stevens's sentiments that "The sea is loveliest by far in the abstract when the imagination can feed on the idea of it". The thing itself provides an escape when language and land become part of the same prison. The sea is where land begins to make sense.
By Monday the biologists are rocking and rolling. They have hit lucky first time: a red tide of the toxic beauties is swirling in a column 20m beneath the ship. The co-operation between the teams is impressive as they pool information, data and instruments. They are dedicated, ambitious, passionate. There is elation when a theory holds, dejection when a thread is lost.
Under the microscope, this creature is russet, like a tiny gyroscope or a Japanese lantern. Dinos, from the Greek: "whirling". Sansoles, from Vigo in Spain, helps me adjust the scope. I see at least four different creatures. The scientists gather around and as I describe what I see - one the delicate green of art deco glass, another like a chain of needles, the colour of vodka, yet another like a tiny amber beetle with a mantle as delicate as gossamer - they name each one. My favourite is the one like a gyroscope and I exclaim at its beauty.
"Yes, but he is bad," Sansoles says. "And red," she adds, mischievously. Dinos, from the Greek, whirling. One cell and made like a jewel. "There are 5,000 species more." Dr Patrick Gentian is amused at my excitement. His grandmother was a lighthouse keeper in Brittany. Gráinne Mhaol, eat your heart out.
ON TUESDAY, THERE are dolphins before breakfast. The Skelligs line up in perfect formation with Lemon Rock. The small island is the colour of coral. Philip Baugh, the ship's master, hands me binoculars and I see it is guano and birds, thousands and thousands of gannets. Ted Sweeney, born on a lighthouse in Blacksod, Co Mayo, tells of a time when rockets were let off to make the birds rise in a great cloud "for the delectation and delight of important gentlemen". Sweeney is the chief engineer. He knows each head and rock and lighthouse. They read like a weather forecast, or a poem: Loop Head, Lamb's Head, Lemon Rock. the Bull, the Calf, the Stags and then, eventually, Fastnet: Carraig Aonair, the childhood soundtrack of every fisherman's child.
EACH MORNING I go to my "desk". Each sunset I sit quietly on the bridge looking out at the changing horizon. Peace is like this. A child in a currach sits watchfully in the stem, a jacket buttoned around her against the breeze. I thank my father silently, and hope his shade can see me.
By Wednesday my logbook shows I am listening to Tom Petty on the headphones, in perfect time to the boat rocking: "Oh my my, oh hell yes! Honey, put on that party dress . . . " The weather has livened up.
On days when there is no land in sight, the great circle of the horizon is complete. The echo sounder shows a hill 100m down. The green scanner mimics the horizon and shows the ship, our enclosed and ordered world, at the exact centre. A piece of equipment called a scanfish is trailing after us. It is raised after eight hours, providing information on tides and temperature. In the dry lab, this data is translated into graphs and diagrams of the sea in motion, and the rivers within it.
Salinity, fluorescence. Language is renewing itself, salty and light. I move from wet lab to deck, putting on a blue hard hat and boots that are too big for me and helping to screw legs onto a space age looking piece of equipment. I await its recovery from the seabed with trepidation, as my mechanical things conspire against me.
The final day at sea is celebratory. The sun shines. Kerry is as gorgeous. The French smoke. Everyone admires. Dr Raine is pleased. When we dock in Galway there are three homeless men under an arch in a smart apartment block. A huge heap of scrap metal lies twisting and rusting in the sun. It has a sculptural beauty. I thank the crew, say goodbye to the scientists, and go back to my life.
Ahoy mateys: science ship for hire
Celtic Explorer is 65½ metres long, with accommodation for 19 scientists and 12 regular crew. The crew are merchant seamen employed by P&O Maritime, who run the ship on behalf of her owners, the Department of the Marine.
She is equipped with a formidable array of electronic equipment, winches and office facilities and is silent, stable in most conditions, and very comfortable to work in. She is available for hire by teams of Irish and international marine scientists.
The master takes the ship where the chief scientist on any particular cruise wants to go, and the crew operates whatever equipment is needed for each task.
The Marine Institute is the statuary body responsible for the co-ordination of marine research and development since 1992.
The mission: hunting for the shellfish spoiler
The tiny single-cell organism called Dinophysis is a toxic species of phytoplankton on which shellfish feed, causing serious loss of profits to fish farmers in certain areas, including the bays of the southeast coast of Ireland.
It causes no ill effects in its host, but it renders shellfish unfit for human consumption. It has been thought for some time that Dinophysis occurred in small patches of about three kilometres wide. In an international first, the research undertaken on Celtic Explorer proved this to be the case.
Scientists had also suspected that those pockets of plankton rode coastal jets first tracked in the 1990s by Dr Liam Fernand, a British member of the team.
Data gathered on this trip proved this theory correct also. Both discoveries will prove vital in coastal planning and ocean management.