At sea with Marley Jarvis (Ocean Crest and Driftwood schools)

Deploying crab and isopod trap

Today was a day of recovery for a lot of people. We keep hauling up really cool stuff from the sea floor with the sub ,and then run around trying to observe everything and do experiments with the animals. This is really exciting, and keeps most of us up really late. Today at 7:00 AM we woke up to wonderful pancakes with chocolate chips cooked by our fabulous chef G.B. I am going to miss him when we get home! Then at 8:00 AM it was time to see Myndee off as she went on her second trip to the sea floor. It is always so exciting to see the sub get launched! The machine they use to put the sub in the water is huge, and it is really cool to see it lift up the whole sub, with all four people inside. The rope it uses is as big as my head! Then all morning it is cool to know that your friend is cruising around the ocean floor. At lunch I found out that there had been a change in the schedule and I was going to be going down in the sub on the afternoon dive! I immediately had butterflies in my stomach and was nervous and really excited! I’ll talk about my dive in my dive log tomorrow, now I’ll talk about the ship.

Lecture on the deck of the ship

After I got back to the ship, we had a lecture on the bow (front of the ship). It was fun to have class outside on the deck of the ship at night under the stars. The warm breeze helped keep us all awake even though we were all tired from doing research and staying up late. There is just so much to see, and it is so exciting to be on this ship and going down in the sub and seeing all of the cool animals we bring up, that it is REALLY HARD to get to bed at a normal hour!

Later on at night, members of the ship crew were fishing off of the boat and saw some flying fish and called us out to look. We saw two dolphins chasing the flying fish, and one of the fish “flew” right onto the boat! The crew is going to use this fish as bait to hopefully catch a tuna or something else really big!

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 8:41 pm and is filed under Gulf of Mexico. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.