If Reefs Could Talk: Day Three
What an amazing day! Last week we had our training day for the Superlite 17 diving helmet, and today I was able to put the excellent instruction of Aquarius crew members, Roger Garcia and Dewey Smith, to use in my first live underwater teaching experience. The day began with a 6 am wake up and a quick breakfast. Aquarius technicians, James and Tim, had already been up for an hours working on the daily habitat check list. With a tight schedule for 3 live broadcasts, we had to be right on time for our appointed departure times from the wet porch. James and Tim staged out aquanauts Chris and Scott on scuba. Thier job for the morning was to assist me with the helmet diving by ensuring my umbilical with my air supply and communications lines didn’t snag and hold me back. Scott held the ‘navy cam’, which he used to send out video of me helmet diving. After Chris and Scott left the wet porch, Tim and James helped me get the Superlite 17 helmet attached and quided me through the safety checks. Safety is paramount down here as the Aquarius crew are fond of saying, “The surface is not an option!”
As I swam off the grating of the wet porch, I settled to the sand bottom below Aquarius to get comfortable with my new head gear. Remember, move the head slowly I told myself or I’ll have people across the country, and maybe the world, feeling seasick. I felt good with the helmet and started walking and swimming around with Chris behind me handling my lines and Scott to my side with the camera. As I panned around, Aquarius came into view with Tim working on installing a new deck in front of the wet porch. This new decking will be used in future saturation missions by NASA and Navy aquanauts. Aquarius is really an impressive site from where I was standing. It’s amazing have smoothly this system operates, but then it has an exception group of dedicated people making sure it functions properly, is safe, and that as much science as possible is accomplished.
As we were waiting for our live broadcast to a 3rd-6th grade classroom here in the Florida Keys, we began looking around for plants and animals, coral and sponges in particular, that related to the class’s current topics. Before beginning the dive, we noticed that one of the large Goliath Groupers usually seen around Aquarius had returned - an excellent target for the video camera. Not soon after the dive started, a large sting ray swam next to me twice. Hopefully people were watching the live feed at that time and saw that sight! Later, we put the camera on a large cobia swimming in quick, tight circles over a large sting ray laying on the bottom under the habitat. After a few minutes of that action, the Goliath Grouper swam over and chased off the cobia.
We had an excellent show with the classroom and the kids were asking great questions. We did a sponge pumping demonstration for the kids and talked about the importance of sponges in coral reef ecosystems. Tonight we rest, as it was a long day in the water, and tomorrow, Chris and I host a live lecture to our university classes in Chapel Hill and Morehead City. It is an unbeleivable experience to teach classes live 60 feet underwater to think about what reef today would say if reefs could talk.
Aquanaut Dr. Niels Lindquist
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