Mission Journal 7 — Meredith Kintzing: Mission Day 7: Sunday, August 21st, 2005
Make a fist. Now put your thumb and pinky fingers up and twist your hand back and forth. This how you signal cool underwater and that is how I would describe our last couple of days. After finishing the vertical array experiment yesterday, we have gone back to cranking out data on sponges. By placing dye near the sponge, we can see how much water it is filtering. One of the giant barrel sponges was shooting out a plume of yellow water at least fifteen feet high! Although the water is pretty warm here, there have been waves of cold water coming across the reef periodically over the past several days. Niels and I did our version of underwater jumping jacks as we floated above the reef to warm up after encountering one of these cold pockets. As we were finishing our last dive of the day, a huge sea turtle swam past Niels and I straight towards one of the Aquarius cameras before veering off onto the reef. We both smiled as we swam towards our underwater home. Don’t let anyone try to tell you science isn’t cool!