“I imagine pulling Ocean Station duties (we maintained several weather boats during the Cold War) had to be incredibly boring duty. You’re literally 1,000 miles from anywhere.”
They probably played a lot of Cribbage, but I did hear a story about an ocean station relief ship that was coming up to relieve the ship on Ocean station and they noticed when they got close there was a crewman pushing a lawn mower on one of the weather decks. The initial thought was probably “these guys are crazy from being out here so long...”
Well it turns out this particular crewman would bring lawn mowers on board the ship so when he was out on Ocean station he could repair the lawn mowers in then he would sell them once he got back to shore.
Pushing a lawn mower when the other crew steams in sounds like a stunt I would have come up with, to scare them into thinking you’ll go nuts out here... just like that ship’s crew did.