POINT LOMA
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After 2½ years at sea, the research vessel Melville sailed home to Point Loma yesterday. The cruise was an epic: 917 days, 100,000-plus miles, 46 scientific missions, 1.6 million gallons of diesel fuel bought for $4 million.
JOHN GASTALDO / Union-Tribune
The Scripps research vessel Melville returned to its home port in Point Loma yesterday after spending 2½ years at sea conducting 46 scientific missions.
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Clearly, the Melville is ready for a nice, long . . . cruise.
“It didn't necessarily have to come home,” said Liz Brenner, who shares the Scripps Institution of Oceanography's ship scheduling duties with Rose Dufour. “If the ship still needed to be in the western Pacific, we'd be heading back there. But we came back because we have a cruise. . . . ”
“Three,” Dufour interrupted.
“We have three cruises out of San Diego,” Brenner said.
The Melville will undergo minor maintenance in port for two months. By December, the 279-foot ship will be bound for Mexico's Guaymas Basin, followed by at least two other eastern Pacific voyages. The oldest ship in the American research fleet, the 39-year-old Melville maintains a flood-tide pace – and that's by design. In an era of increasing competition for dwindling research dollars, the race is not to the swift or the young: It's to the ship that stays at sea.
As one of 29 ships in the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS), the Melville is rented by researchers from across the nation. During its just completed voyage, Penn State, Johns Hopkins, the Navy and a dozen other clients – including Scripps – used the old sailor.
And every chief scientist graded Melville's performance, publicly posting those marks with UNOLS.
“We are very competitive,” said Bruce Appelgate, who oversees Scripps' four-ship fleet as associate director of ship operations and marine technical support. “We want to be better than Woods Hole, than Oregon State, than Hawaii and everybody else. And our customers, the scientists, want to use the best tools they can.
“But we're not cutthroat entirely. We couldn't exist without other healthy organizations.”
Still, there's nothing like a long, successful cruise to demonstrate that many leagues are left in this old hull. As the Melville crossed San Diego Bay yesterday, reporters were briefed on how scientists aboard the ship had used a submersible robot to film an underwater volcano's eruption and how others had launched and recovered aerial drones to measure the Earth's magnetic field.
“We turned Melville into an aircraft carrier,” said Jeff Gee, a professor in residence at Scripps.
While the Melville is still doing cutting-edge science, it's not the most up-to-date vessel. Roi Granot, a Scripps graduate student, said some vessels are being designed with fuel-saving hybrid engines. Fuel costs are especially high aboard older and heavier vessels, and the 2,516-ton Melville qualifies on both counts.
Yesterday, the Melville refueled.
Total gallons: 109,000.
Price: $376,000.
“That's a townhouse,” said Anja Engledow, marine purchasing specialist for Scripps.
But if you can stand some pain at the pump, the Melville is a popular home on the high seas. Its seven levels are large enough to accommodate an exercise room, a foosball table, a library whose selections run the gamut from Harry Potter to the Britannica Great Books of the Western World series, and a galley offering Coke and Sprite.
The ship spent 256 days at sea in 2007, and is expected to notch 298 this year.
Susan Merle, an oceanographer from Oregon State University, sailed aboard the Melville for two of its most recent 46 scientific missions. What would she report to UNOLS?
“I'm going to say that this is one of the best ships that I've ever sailed. I love the Melville.”
As for Granot, he might note that Melville doesn't have that factory-fresh, new-ship smell. Beyond that? “In terms of science, it was great,” he said. “The quality and professionalism of the scientific technicians was outstanding.”
