The emergency drill is called "citadel in place." The place is a stronghold below deck on the NOAA ship Ronald H. Brown where researchers and crew members would hide if the ship was attacked by pirates.
This time it wasn't a drill. A 50-foot-long fishing vessel closed in, not responding to calls, with a smaller craft tied to its rail that looked like an attack boat. The vessel came within 100 feet.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ship was more than 200 miles out from the Maldives Islands in the vast stretch of pirate waters in the Indian Ocean — waters where research hadn't been done since 1995 because of the fear of attacks on ships.
Then the men aboard fishing boat began to gesture to Capt. Daniel Simon: fingers to their mouths and exhales like smoke, cupped hands and the mouths chewing.
"In the end, I think they just wanted cigarettes and food," Simon said. "But it was a tense moment."
The Ronald H. Brown returned to its Charleston port Monday night from a 243-day voyage that circled the world, conducting research and servicing more than 80 buoys that provide data for the research. The 275-foot-long vessel is NOAA's largest, most traveled, and only ocean-going oceanic research vessel.
The NOAA ship Ronald H. Brown has just returned from a cruise around the world performing research and servicing buoys. Seaman Nick Granozio/ NOAA
The ship launched in February less than a year after completing an epic three-year trip doing the same work. This time, the explorers traveled more than 44,000 miles with stretches between ports that lasted more than month at a time.
The tense, pivotal leg of the trip was the 1,900-mile run between the Seychelles and Goa, India, through pirate-traveled waters. The lack of recent research there had become a gap in critical global data for climate and phenomena such as Atlantic hurricanes.
Those storms evidently can be steered toward landfall by winds first stirred in Indian Ocean monsoons.Â
"That part of the ocean is rarely reached anyway," said Denis Volkov, the NOAA physical oceanographer who was the chief scientist aboard the ship.
Among other findings based on a preliminary read of the measurements, Volkov learned that chlorofluorocarbons, the banned chemical coolant that is a greenhouse gas, were now in relatively high concentrations in the deep ocean after not being found at all in 1995.
The ship's crew also set three data buoys in those waters after India agreed to protect and maintain the buoys.
The crew of NOAA's research ship Ronald H. Brown serviced 80 buoys in seas around the world during its most recent trip. Seaman Nick Granozio/ NOAA
The crew battled a series of Indian Ocean monsoons that brought deluge rain and blew winds hard enough to raise seas as high as 13 feet. In the Pacific, the ship dodged the 160-mph winds of Hurricane Lane and battled through the 70-mph winds of Tropical Storm Sergio to service buoys.
Simon took over as captain during the trip in a regular change of command. On Monday night, Simon's wife and his young children in their pajamas were waiting at the shipyard when the Ron Brown tied off. After an earlier stint aboard NOAA's Charleston-berthed Nancy Foster, Simon is a Charleston resident again.
"Last night, I went home (to James Island) and saw my house for the first time," he said.
The Ron Brown is scheduled to go back out in February.
The fate of its long-term mission remains undetermined. NOAA's current proposed budget contains no cuts for the program, said spokeswoman Monica Allen.
But the federal government is operating largely on a continuing resolution that keeps earlier budget priorities in place. Both NOAA and the Department of Commerce have been cited previously in budget cuts proposed by the Trump administration.