Mission Journal 5 — Niels Lindquist: Mission Day 2: Tuesday, August 10th, 2004
The conditions on the reef have not improved today - still very murky and shifting currents. Jeremy and I staged out before 8 am and got right to work repositioning the ADV over another sponges and getting the particle feed set up. This took about 1 hour. We then we began using dye and a video camera to record how fast many other sponges were filtering seawater. It took about 15 minutes to do this for each sponge. This information, in conjunction with data on the types of chemicals in sponge exhalent water, will be crucial for determining the amounts of these chemicals sponges release into reef water and the impact these chemical have on reef health.
Jeremy and I finished our first dive around 1 pm. At AQUARIUS we downloaded data from the ADV, recharged camera batteries, changed film and had lunch. During the break I also check several of the weather website and saw images of a growing storm in the Caribbean Sea - this was not what I wanted to see. Our afternoon dive began at 5 pm and conditions were still less than ideal. Jeremy and I swam back out to the NE sites, passing Chris and Meredith doing sponge abundance counts on our way out to our research site. We set up our ADV again and then started up with the dye release video work. The strong current made this work very difficult. We were due back at the habitat soon, so we gathered up our gear and swam back along the excursion line examining sponges and other reef animals as we moved along the lines, which was not difficult as the current was pushing us back towards AQUARIUS. We staged back into the habitat just before 8 pm, racking up over 8 hours of excursion time on day 2 of our mission.
After showering, I rechecked the weather web sites and found that the storms in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico were getting bigger and moving closer to Key Largo. At this point we were told by the AQUARIUS tech saturating with us, Thor and Roger, that these storms, and particularly the one in the Caribbean, Charley, might force us to abort our mission. We went to sleep thinking we might have at least one more dive and then we’d begin our 17 hours of decompression needed before leaving AQUARIUS for the surface.