Day Two

I'm just about to reach the end of Day 2 (okay, well officially Day One at sea) and boy am I tired! Your body really has to work to get used to being on a ship, even though you may not be thinking about it. I have had much more caffeine than usual today and am hardly feeling it.

This morning we went through a quick safety training/drill and then did a practice run with the CTD rosette (CTD stands for Conductivity, Temperature, and Depth). Essentially, we can deploy a set of automated bottles at any depth we want, and program to open and shut automatically. Then after a short while, we can bring these back onto the ship, and collect the water from them. Of specific interest to researchers on our ship are levels of nutrients and chlorophyll, pH, salinity, zooplankton and phytoplankton tiny plants and animals), and sediment.

CTD Equipment at Port

Our first real CTD casting will be tomorrow around 6:30AM, so I'll be sleeping at that point. However, I'll get to do a couple of collections tomorrow. By the evening, we should be in the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary in northern Washington state.

The food was excellent all day - lunch was a tuna melt sandwich, and we even had a prime rib roast for dinner with baked potatoes!

Well, it's time to run another sample! We are running unfiltered sea water through the system every hour, as well as another automated system every 20 minutes...just enough to keep busy all shift!

More tomorrow, and photos later,
Shea