Mission Journal 3 — Jim Leichter: Mission Day 2: Tuesday, June 15th, 2004
It’s Day 2 of the mission and everything is off to a great start. Our wake up call came at 6 this morning. Waking up underwater is one of the many exciting things about living in the Habitat. But 6:15 it was just starting to get light out on the reef while we sipped our coffee and looked out the view port. Large fish were still out feeding by the lights of the Habitat darting in from time to time to catch their prey. At one point a shower of fish scales came down past the view port — somebody having and somebody else becoming breakfast in one swoop.
After breakfast we staged out for our morning excursion which was 3-1/2 hours down to a depth of 110-ft. Between this morning’s dive and the ones yesterday when we were out for a total of just over 5 hours we have now already deployed most of the large cable array. This system has 100 individual temperature sensors set up as on a grid across the reef and gives us a unique spatial view of the waves of cool water washing on shore. There still a lot to be done, but by late today we expect to have accomplished 90% deployment that took us over a week of surface diving in last year. And, with the extended bottom time available from saturation diving we can make much more careful observations. But these advantages of saturation diving only come with a lot of work from the various support crews before and during the mission. As we relax now for a lunch of delicious re-hydrated camping food our trusty Habitat technicians, the topside Aquarius crew, and our topside support divers are all hard at work.