How did I just sleep 11 hours straight?

So it's day three out here- we are somewhere off the coast of New York- we can see New York City from the side of the boat. There are a ton of boats out here too, which is cool because we haven't been seeing a ton in other spots. It's also a pain in the ass because when there are other boats around, we have to reroute our dragging equipment so it doesn't get mixed up with them. The past few days have been interesting. Monday we basically got used to the ship and steamed. I am on the day shift: noon-midnight, so I got to work our first catch when we reached our first sampling point somewhere near Rhode Island. My first task was to attach these things called "minilogs" to the equipment that we drop down. Little did I know that "attaching" meant climbing up into the dredge (I think it's called a dredge) and sitting on a little bar that separates me from falling through down a slope into the water. It was pretty scary at first, but by now I am used to it. We got through three tows on Monday night, and by the third, I was exhausted. It was hard to get acclimated to the waves too, so I slept awful Monday night into Tuesday. Yesterday, I realized the trick to always feeling good on the ship- eat like a frickin pig. No joke. I don't think I've eaten this much in a weeks, but if you don't keep an empty stomach, it will come back and bite you in the ass, like I found out Monday night when I threw up the little amount of food I had in my stomach, then proceeded to eat like a whole roll of crackers. Yesterday we got into some "fun" stuff and I realized that if I didn't make the best of being out here for 12 days, it was going to be a long miserable time. So, I got into it. We started sampling quahogs and surf clams and had to take the meat from the clams and measure them: I made a race out of it- who can rip all the meat out of the clams first? I won once out of probably 30 times against Vic, the head scientist, killed me. My crew is pretty awesome- there are 5 of us, 2 short of what it should be. We all work hard and fast. Between tows when we don't have a billion clams and quahogs, we occupy ourselves with fly killing and Arnold impersonations. We have been pulling up some interesting things-not as in specimens, as in hellish things to clean out. Yesterday we pulled up about a billion pounds of clay- it was pretty much raining clay for a good 20 minutes. But a tow just came up- I'll try to write more on the next steam. More clay and mud! Time to get dirty in the first 5 minutes of a 12 hours shift