Mission Journal 5 — Sarah Fangman: Mission Day 4: Tuesday, November 15th, 2005
This morning we awoke to cloudy viewports - not surprising given the seas we experienced all night! You may wonder how we know anything about the seas way down here on the sea floor…turns out that every time a wave passes overhead the pressure in the undersea lab changes, and our ears pop! I actually enjoy the rhythmic “whoosh”ing of the air in and out of Aquarius. It’s soothing - it reminds me of the sound of waves on the beach.
The other way we can tell that the seas are rough above is by watching the fish in the viewport. Without flinching a fin, they move in a circular motion: up, back, down and forward. Much like if they were in a washing machine!
As one who gets horribly seasick, I’m so very happy to be working from the sea floor! And all the more grateful of the professional and dedicated surface support team, who come out no matter what the conditions, to make sure we have all the supplies we need and to ensure that the habitat is functioning beautifully. They are outside as I type, filling our water tanks, so we can keep hydrated (important for keeping decompression sickness away) and so we can have our delicious hot showers! After four hours in the water, I’m shivering when I return to the habitat, so a hot shower is blissful!
The rough seas really stir up the sediment, and made finding fishes especially challenging this morning! Emma’s and my task is to find blue parrotfish, hogfish or black grouper and observe their behavior for twenty minutes. We also document the habitats they visit. We are recording data for fishes that James and Ashley have tagged, and fishes that are tag-free. The idea is to determine if tagging alters fish behavior in any way.
Once we spot a fish that we wish to observe, one of us attaches our cord-reel to the excursion line (a series of excursion lines lead from the Aquarius to several locations around the reef). Because surfacing is not an option, we always need to have a positive means to return to Aquarius. So one of our buddy team is responsible for keeping track of the excursion line by tying our reel to it and spooling out the line as the fish leads us around the reef. During the twenty minute observation period the fish can have us ALL OVER the reef! Sometimes I think they are just trying to get us lost - payback for poking them with a tag! Thank goodness for our fine training - we are always able to follow our own line track back to the excursion line, and to the habitat and a HOT SHOWER (Thank you, surface support team!)