Diving with Greg Gavelis (Highland Elementary)

Each day this week I’ve stood on deck, waiting for the sub to come up. When it does, I wave to the cockpit and am excited just to know the people in it. I always wondered how much more exciting it must be to actually be in the sub, and wondering “why are all those people waving at me?” Yesterday I got my chance.

I was not in the cockpit of the sub but the room in the back. I had always thought of it as being the “trunk” of the sub, but it turned out to be quite spacious. There were even pillows and blankets back there! I shared the room with Frank, the technician, while Bob (the scientist) rode in front with Craig (the pilot) in the cockpit, which was a separate room. As we waited to reach the bottom, lying there on blankets, Frank with a book, and me by the window, I almost got the feeling that we were at a sleepover on the bottom of the sea. But that was a silly idea, because once we reached the bottom, we had a lot of work to do. My job was to write down everything we saw. So in fact it was not at all like a sleepover, but more like a class. I was taking notes in the great dark classroom of the deep sea.

Our mission was to survey the brine pool, the same famous undersea landmark that was featured in the Blue Planet series. An underwater “lake”, the supersalty water was opal-blue and very still. It reminded me of the lake of the dead from the Harry Potter books; it even had pale white bodies that sailed through it. These weren’t zombies, but the bodies of fish that had been unlucky enough to swim into the salty death trap.

A few years ago, Bob had placed boxes of rabbit food near the brine pool. This crazy idea was actually a carefully planned experiment. Over time the rabbit food would rot, and become covered by bacteria. Many deep sea creatures eat nothing but bacteria, so this could attract animals from far and wide. Near the boxes, we encountered a crab with a four foot claw span and Craig managed to capture it in a large box by skillfully using the sub’s robotic arm. We also spotted some deep sea ratfish, venus-flytrap anemones and a whole lot of mussels. After three hours, it was time to return to the surface, and we bid this strange underwater world goodbye.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 8:23 am and is filed under Gulf of Mexico. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.