My original purpose in writing these Cruise Logs was to produce something for my wife and children to give them an idea of what I was doing during my sea-going oceanographic career when I might otherwise have been staying home like a good husband and father. At the time, I figured that Betty might be interested in knowing more about my experiences. And when the children were older, they, too, might like to know what their father was doing during the long months when they were young and I was only occasionally a direct part of their lives during their school years.
At some point, as the years went by and the collection of Cruise Logs grew longer, the thought occurred to me that eventually it might be worthwhile typing them up in a more organized and readable format. This way Betty and the children might have something that would be interesting to them and possibly to future generations. By the time I finished going to sea and was able to look back at the entire bookshelf of these logs, I realized that my typing skills, if that's the word I want, were so miserably poor that even the thought of the task was too daunting for me to try to handle.
Although I had been able to remain almost entirely innocent of the computer age up to that point, the thought came that maybe the "word processing" phase of computers might make it possible, even for such a poor typist as I am, to make a decent stab at the job. At this time our two eldest children, Mike and Peg, were deeply "into" computers, and Chris, who was living at home at the time, also had acquired a good deal of experience in their use. Chris and I discussed the matter, and with his guidance, I bought a relatively modest Macintosh "Apple 2C", and set to work on the logs. Without Chris's tutelage I probably would never have made the grade, but when I got started I found the whole business to be perfectly fascinating. (One of the most notable results is that now while sitting in front of the computer I find "word processing" so much fun that, as is demonstrated in this "brief" note, I am almost incapable of knowing when to stop.)
Anyway, by the time I'd finished the whole collection of Cruise Logs, Betty wanted to know what I intended to do with them. I had a single copy of each log, and whole stack of floppy disks to show for my labors. There were an outstanding number of errors in syntax and grammar, and the typographical errors were embarrassingly numerous. It was suggested that possibly the WHOI Archives might be a fitting repository, and I checked with Bill Dunkle, the Archivist. He indicated that the Archives would welcome having the whole collection, so I felt the time had come to try to correct some of the errors.
Since these logs had originally developed as extended letters to my wife and contained a lot of personal and private ramblings as well as a good deal of personal family references that would have no meaning whatsoever to readers outside the family, it would take a rather extensive amount of editing to produce something that might be of interest to people going through the WHOI Archives. Again, the computer age made this type of project easily dealt with, and so I was able to do the editing relatively easily and quickly.
Another factor came up which had to be dealt with. These logs contained my personal and private thoughts put down on the spur of the moment while the events were taking place. In a way, the log books served as a place where I could let off steam, as it were, rather than having to keep things bottled up inside me. Much of the time I would put down comments that I would much prefer did not see the light of day outside of my own family. I often told people that I felt it would probably be best if the logs were not exposed to the public until the people mentioned in them were all dead, since some of my remarks were unnecessarily sharp, or unkind or unfair. On the other hand, if I edited all that sort of material out of the finished product, then any value the logs might have as a contemporary commentary of the times would be compromised. So the logs, as they appear in this collection are exactly as written at the time with only those parts pertaining strictly to my wife, children and family matters removed, and the typographical and the more egregious grammatical errors corrected. (I suspect many of these things have slipped through in spite of my attempts at correcting them, and I can only apologize for them.)
