Mission Journal 6 — Mark Ward: Mission Day 2: Friday, April 25th, 2003
The faint aqua-glow of morning nudged me from sleep and my bunk. The bustle of the reef never rested however. The night shift composed of hyperactive plankton, flinching shrimp and the occasional squid simply faded into dawn as the day shift those familiar hogfish, jacks and seargeant majors - took to the stage outside our viewports. It was just after 6:30am and I slept as might be expected - deeply.
Jim and Billy had been up for a while tackling the daily tasks required to keep a habitat functioning normally. I joined them in the galley and smeared peanut butter on some soda crackers while my coffee filtered into a large plastic mug.
With breakfast out of the way, I turned my attention to another impending test with our broadcast partners. We connected easily and with enough time for us to tweak the placement of our video lights and cameras long before the events 9:30 start time. We even had time to choreograph the movement of cameraman (me) and light guy (Billy) to follow Jim on the planned tour of Aquarius.
We were feeling very confident about the prospects for acing the link. Instead we learned that gremlins live just as easily underwater as they do on land. The connection that had moments earlier linked the four centers with sound and video simply evaporated. We waited and waited and waited for another call to bring it all together again, but it never came. Instead we were left to imagine the scene at the two science centers as Ellen Prager in Fort Lauderdale and Linda Walters - in Orlando, shouldered the hosting duties on their own, recounting their own experiences as Aquarius aquanauts.
The event window closed at 10:30, so we switched off the lights and cameras and coiled the cables and cords for another day. On to the next project an extended dive to the North East way station. Before that, we had visitors from above. Byron swam down to tinker with an uncooperative webcam and Mark and Kea, came in to guide us on our dive. With our topside companions leading the way down one of Aquarius many excursion lines we headed out John and Lew and single Scuba cylinders, Billy and I on twin one hundreds (carrying about enough air each to fill two phone booths at the surface).
The three hundred yard swim to the NE station, was punctuated with multiple clicks of my digital camera and soon we had arrived. Its a neat feeling to come up inside an air-filled refuge when youre out in the middle of the sea - sort of like finding a well-equipped tree house on a long jungle trek. Inside the white gazebo Marked checked in via intercom with Jim back at Aquarius and Lew and John charged up their singles while Billy and I swam around the outside looking for worthy photo subjects. The visability was only 30-40 feet so long distance shooting was not in the cards and our short mission wouldnt allow for another day of shooting.
Their tanks recharged, we all sped back toward Aquarius so Mark and Kea could surface safely within their limits. Standing waste deep in the moonpool, Billy and I mated our fill hoses into the onboard high pressure fill line and in minutes we were ready for another dive. Someone joked about the commercial potential for establishing a chain of underwater fill stations amid popular reefs but of course that would also increase the need for hyperbaric chambers to treat the surge in resulting bends victims without an underwater habitat to return to, you only have so much time to spend underwater before you must return to the surface.
Our tanks charged up, Billy and I dipped down and out of the moonpool for an extended underwater tour of Aquarius, hovering along and under her shape but never above it (Our saturation profile limited us to about 40 feet beneath the surface just enough to peer in our bunk room viewport).
After more than three hours in the water, my camera battery reading had shrunk to zero, our tanks pressure readings were dropping too and so were our body temps, so Billy and I decided to head inside for a hot shower and some lunch. While snacking on hot oatmeal and some tea I resumed my favorite undersea pastime observing the constant circus of sea life. It good to be part of the show.