Mission Journal 1 — Emma Hickerson: Mission Day 1: Saturday, November 12th, 2005
Mission: November, 2005 Saturation
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Can you imagine sitting drinking a hot chocolate in the warmth and dry air, and inches from your face a Goliath grouper swims past the window! That’s happening here, now, 60 feet below the surface at the Aquarius Undersea Laboratory. Amazing!
This morning, our mission left the surface, and headed for the depths - a weird sensation when you stick your regulator into your mouth, and first take that breath as your head slips underwater, and you think - wow, I’m not going to see the blue sky until SEVEN DAYS from now!!!
We wouldn’t be here tonight, our first night living underwater, without the ENORMOUS effort by the NURC/Aquarius team, who have been working nonstop to get the Aquarius Undersea Laboratory repaired after Hurricane Rita - thank you thank you thank you!
We left the surface soon after 9 AM this morning with Ross (NURC) and Navy Diver Aaron (MDSU 2), on an excursion to acquaint us with several of the excursion lines that are laid out around Aquarius. At all times when the Aquanauts are in the water, we have an excursion line within our reach, or we have attached a line on a reel attached to the excursion line so that we know EXACTLY which direction Aquarius is.
During our morning dive we saw a couple of black grouper that had been captured and tagged with acoustic and ID tags earlier last week - good news! They are well, and still in the area!
We said goodbye to Ross and Aaron as they returned to the surface, and we were O-fficially AQUANAUTS!!! Woo-hoo!!! We started our saturation tasks as directed - Sarah and Emma headed out to document behavior of blue parrotfish, hogfish, and black grouper for 20 minute census periods. James and Ashley set some traps to tag more fish - success! They caught and tagged 2 hogfish.
Our Habitat techs, Mark (Otter) and Dom, are taking care of us - constantly monitoring gauges and reporting into base.
It’s been a long, exciting day - I can’t wait to reward myself, one of the newest Aquanauts, with a delicious prepackaged, dehydrated, camp meal! The best part will be going to bed tonight, with the night life of the ocean going on before my eyes through the big porthole at my feet.