Mission Journal 13 — Addie Coyac:: Mission Day 6 - 8: Monday, June 21st, 2004
Jim and I are in for the day, we had a nice five and a half hour dive this morning. We did lots of surveying and picture taking. These last 3 days have flown by. We’ve used at least 90% of our available dive time and accomplished most of our tasks down here. I’m still thrilled about being down here. I was warned that I would get worn out and tired, but those are things I can deal with as long as I get to be in the water. Last night and the night before, all four of us went on night dives. How incredible! We were looking for coral recruitments at depths of 90, 70, and 50 feet. We used these blue lights with yellow face mask filters. They acted just like black lights and made all the corals fluoresce. We were then able to count and identify the corals in our quadrats. The neat thing was seeing all the other organisms fluoresce, things like tubeworms, anemones, and algae. On our way back to the habitat, we kept our masks on and used only the blue light to light our way. All the coral polyps were out feeding as well as the basket stars. As I was pulling myself along I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye so I turned my regular light on and there was an octopus sitting on the reef. Jim and I interacted with it for a few minutes before it slithered away into the night. The night before, Steve and I saw a reef squid that really enjoyed basking in our light as well as 2 spotted scorpionfish and lots of little shrimp with glowing red lights as we shined our lights on them. Tomorrow morning Jim and I are going out at 5 am to try to get some last quadrats in. I’m a little weary of having to wake up that early, but I’m sure once I get into the water, I’ll be wide awake. That dive will be our last time in the water on this mission, we will have 2 hours and then back to the habitat for decompression. We will be in the habitat for a total of 17 hours while we decompress the habitat to 1 atmosphere. Once this has occurred, we splash once more into the water to the surface to a waiting boat that will take us back to land. I don’t want to go back; I’ve become so used to being in the water that I’m afraid of being land-sick when I actually walk around up there.