Thursday, Oct. 1, 2009 – sub log
Diving with Marley Jarvis (Ocean Crest and Driftwood schools)
Tube worms just brought up from the deep sea
I found out at lunch yesterday that there was a change in the schedule and that I would be diving in a couple of hours. I immediately got butterflies in my stomach. In a couple of hours I would be on the bottom of the ocean!! I felt like I was about to go to the moon. The time I had to wait before going in the sub seemed to last forever. Finally, I waved to my friends and climbed up the hatch into the sub. The opening to the sub is high up, so I had to step on something and hoist myself up. It is a tiny opening, so the two of us going in the back had to climb in one at a time.
As we went down, tons and tons of plankton and dead bits and sediment and detritus and bubbles swirled around the tiny window in the back of the sub where I was sitting. I could look closely and see all of the zooplankton swimming and floating by: tiny shrimp, copepods, and worms. After about 10 minutes, the light from the surface was all gone and the sub pilot left the lights off so we could see all of the bioluminescence. It looked like I was lying in a field at night looking up at really bright stars. But the stars were all alive and moving incredibly fast! The stars swirled and changed shape and zoomed past and exploded into a hundred little lights blinking on and off. I got a little dizzy watching, but it was so beautiful I couldn’t look away! When we started to approach the bottom, the sub pilot turned on the lights to the sub. It was really cool to see all the zooplankton swimming around and crowding around the light of the sub like moths do to a lamp at night. I even saw a tiny baby squid the size of my fingernail scoot past my window. I could hear the pilot talking over the radio saying that we were getting close to the bottom.
I was so excited to finally see what the bottom of the ocean looked like that I strained and craned my neck to see. Finally, a ghostly white, muddy bottom appeared. There were patches of tube worms, starfish, urchins, and lots of fish and crab. Everything was standing incredibly still! The crabs did not seem to move a claw, and even the fish hovered above with their still shadows on the muddy bottom. What an alien world! I can’t wait to go back down on my second dive.