My friends know I worry about things. With that in mind, I present a list of things I worried about before boarding an icebreaker for 45 days in the Arctic Ocean. In the end, none of these mattered at all.

1) The food. The food on Oden has been great. Truly. The kitchen staff has done a fantastic job – and I am a picky eater.

We even had a dinner of bacon! (I’m being a bit facetious, it was fläsk, which looks rather like bacon to an American, but is more like extremely-super-thick bacon served as the meat at dinner. Note to my Dad: Yes, I ate the fat. Patrick didn’t. He missed out.)

Seriously, the meals on Oden have been good, which may have something to do with the gym on Oden being in use most of the time...

2) Seasickness. Knock on wood, but I brought many seasickness pills and bands and such... and haven’t needed any of them. Partly we’ve had calm weather. I’ve never been seasick, but I’ve seen people seasick, and I was worried about 6 weeks of seasickness. Especially since many people told me that icebreakers roll more than regular ships in open water.

3) No soda for 45 days. But, um, sorry leg 2 folks, your supply might be a little thin...

4) Boredom. This one now seems really silly. I thought we’d have a very automated system for measuring atmospheric methane – and we do – but there was always something to be done. (I think the ship’s doctor has been a little bored during the cruise, though. Fortunately!)



5) Isolation. Several times, I went outside and stood at the railing and looked out to the horizon – a horizon of either of water or ice. I would think about how far we were from anyone else. There aren’t a lot of places in the world – even on the ocean – where you can truly get a long way from other people; we’ve been to some of those places in the past few weeks. But I couldn’t really make the isolation bother me. The “adventure” feeling dwarfed any isolation feeling.

I also worried about forgetting a critical part for an instrument – that didn’t happen either. A long planning period before SWERUS-C3 helped with that. I could list several other things I was worried about regarding SWERUS-C3 that turned out to not matter. In the future: save some of that worry energy for other things!

Nothing magical here, but maybe there’s a lesson here: concern is useful (leads to action). Worry, not useful (leads to inaction or more worry). Maybe I’m starting to understand this better, and putting it into action, too.