Mission Journal 8 — Jo Gascoigne: Day 6: Saturday, July 19th, 2003
Today we had the luxury of a small lie-in - Mark and I didn’t stage out until 9am! This is 30-45 minutes later than usual and it was very welcome. I had a deluxe breakfast this morning too, because the surface team sent down some raisins to go with my morning oatmeal - thanks chaps!
We briefly checked the chambers to make sure all was well, but Kristen and Janet were hot on our heels to do the morning tissue sampling and PAM-ing, so we didn’t have to stay there long. One of the pumps was broken, but luckily we have a spare and Janet and Kristen were able to replace it later in the morning. Next, Mark and I went over to set up an ADV (Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter) on the reef next to the habitat. In case the name doesn’t leave you much the wiser (I know it doesn’t me) this is an instrument that measures the speed and direction of the water flow at a point above the reef. One of the things we have been doing this mission, with the help of our surface divers, is moving it around so that we have some current data from the various sites where we have been working - knowing about the speed and direction of flow is very important to our project. It took us a while to set up, because it’s pretty heavy, even underwater and the top measuring part is delicate. Also, the current was strong, so we had to be very careful not to flail around and bash it. I saw another scorpionfish on the reef next to the ADV while Mark was messing around with zip-ties, putting the finishing touches to the set-up. They have amazing camouflage - for the first few days I didn’t see any but now that I have got my eye in I see that they are quite common. Another cool thing that you only notice with the benefit of the time underwater that Aquarius gives you!
Once that was done, we set off on an excursion to look for worms. We flew out along the Pinnacle line with the current and dropped down the excursion line to 110 feet, where there is plenty of the rubble-type habitat that the bristle worms like. We did several transects, but had to leave earlier than usual, to make sure we had plenty of time to get home against the current - lucky we did because it was really tough going.
In the evening, we were doing a night dive, so we had a nice long time to rest inside the habitat. We are usually obliged to have four hours, to make sure that we have lost most of the additional nitrogen we accumulate by doing deep dives in the morning. Four hours sounds like a long time, but somehow it flies by! It takes us a while after we “stage in” (finish our dive back at the wetporch) to fill our tanks, take them off and put away our dive gear, rinse our suits, shower and get dressed. Then we are usually STARVING. I have invented the Special Jo Burrito, which is my usual lunch:
Recipe: Take one tortilla, cover liberally with grated cheese, microwave until bubbly. Meanwhile, add boiling water to one packet of Mountain House Mexican rice and beans, wait for the mixture to rehydrate. Spread this on the cheese tortilla, add a good dollop of salsa, some lettuce, and ranch dressing. Mmmmmmmmmmmmm…
Actually, today lunch was a little delayed because we had a visit from a journalist from Reuters, who was interested in the habitat, and in Mark’s experiment on coral bleaching. Mark and Coop talked to him for a while very eloquently - I hope he goes away and writes about how cool this place is! After he left, we had time for a quick lunch before the surface team came to pay us a visit. It was really cool to see them all down here, and I think they had fun. They also brought a visitor who works for the Senate - so I hope we made a good impression on her too. Bridget - if you are reading this, I hope you had fun! We have been having a lot of visitors recently - yesterday Jim Buckley, the Habitat Operations Manager, came to “baby-sit” so that Coop and Roger could go out on an excursion. It was great to have him down here, especially since he brought us ice-cream (Ben and Jerry’s!) and homemade cheesecake - thanks Jim and Kea!
We set off on our night dive at 7:15pm (I should say 1915, in habitat parlance). We were going back to the Pinnacle with the oxygen and pH profiler and the PAM. We got out there only to find that the profiler was still playing up. The oxygen part is not working well, although the pH and temperature parts are still fine. Luckily, pH gives some of the same information as oxygen about respiration and photosynthesis, so it’s not a bust, although it is frustrating. Still, that’s science for you… Mark and I headed back to see if we could sort it out, while Janet and Kristen carried on PAM-ing around the Pinnacle before following us. We saw a lot of really cool things on the dive - huge filter-feeding brittlestars (called basketstars), a turtle, and horseshoe crabs. The corals look really different during the night because their polyps, which are closed during the day, open up so that the animals can feed - just like a flower coming out. Kristen and Janet also saw something BIG and SHARK-LIKE under the habitat when they came back, which has had us looking over our shoulders ever since…
We all carried on working (and looking around) near the habitat, until it was time to come in. Then the techs, Coop and Roger, kindly let us stay out another few minutes, as long as we stayed “at storage” (no deeper than the wetporch so we didn’t take on any more nitrogen). We had a wonderful time out on the grating looking at the plankton and bioluminescence in the water and the animals on the habitat. There are probably representatives of half the known animal phyla in the animals that live in the holes in the grating! - sponges, corals, fish, crabs and shrimp, clams, worms, sea urchins and brittlestars, as well as less well-known creatures like bryozoans and tunicates (filter-feeding animals that look a bit like sponges and are our closest invertebrate relative!). We staged in at around 10pm, and for a while our excitement was warring with our tiredness, but the tiredness won out fairly quickly and we all went to bed and slept like babies as always, lulled by the sound of the snapping shrimp.