Mission Journal 1 — Kristen Delano: Day 1: Monday, July 14th, 2003
Today I made my first dive on Aquarius- a dive that won’t end until 10 days from now! We won’t be in the water the whole time, but we’ll remain at about 50 feet deep or deeper, both inside and outside our underwater home. This is my first saturation mission ever and it’s already been an amazing experience! We “splashed” at 10am this morning with our awesome trainer, Otter, sending us off and Byron and Joe helping to pot down a few more items needed to keep us comfortable and working for the next 10 days. Jo and I were buddies for the day. As we floated down through the water the habitat slowly came into view. There were large schools of yellow schoolmasters hugging the wet porch and legs of the habitat and a variety of other fishes hovering over the bottom directly under the habitat.
We checked in at the habitat with our mission technicians, Coop and Roger, and got to work right away. Our first task of the day was to go and find the corals that we used in November for our chamber experiments. We glued them back on the reef just outside of the habitat and tagged them so we could find them again this mission. The surface team, Randy and Lauren, then arrived and photographed each one so we would know what they looked like after having enjoyed some “time off” from our experiments! After Randy and Lauren departed we took measurements of flow direction and fluorescence (a way to measure how the photosynthetic machinery is performing in the symbiotic algae inside the corals). All the corals looked happy and healthy! Later in the day the corals would be removed from the reef and placed back in their chambers for another round of experiments over the coming days.
At around 1pm we came inside for lunch and a break until 3 pm and then headed out on an excursion line for another task- checking fluorescence of wild corals out on Conch Reef. We found lots of our species of corals to check and saw some other neat creatures too- a bunch of spiny lobsters, arrow crabs, spotted moray eels, and a really cool juvenile fish called a spotted drum, which looks kind of like a black and white miniature angel fish with really long fins that trail behind it on the top and bottom of its body. Between two dives, Jo and I spent 5 hours and 35 minutes diving today - who’d have thought I’d ever be able to do that!! The snapping shrimp sound like rain on the outside of the habitat, and are beckoning us to our bunks at the end of an exciting first day. We’ll sleep like a rock tonight…coral, that is.