Mission Journal 1 — Niels Lindquist: Mission Day 1: Monday, August 9th, 2004
Conditions can change quickly on Florida coral reefs. Two days before we splashed down on Monday morning the water over Conch Reef was beautiful – warm and clear top to bottom. Today, however, the water looked very different. It was difficult to see my buddy, Jeremy Wiesz, when he was only 20 feet away from me. The current was swift too, and between the morning and afternoon dives the current did a 180 degree turn, which really helped make the trip back from the NE research site to AQUARIUS very easy. No tell what we’ll wake up to tomorrow.
Our experiments went well today. Jeremy and I set up our ADV (Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter) over a barrel type sponge so we could measure how much water sponges were filtering over a 24 hour period. Because sponges do such a great job filtering particles from seawater, we had to add small particles to the water coming out of the sponge so that the sounds that beam from the ADV had particles that would reflect the sound back to the receivers. We’d get some unusual spike in our data when fish would stick their noses into the sponge to investigate the particles – didn’t expect that to happen.
Dining at Café AQUARIUS is more like camping than having dinner in a fine seafood restaurant, however, freeze-dried dinners taste better today than they did years ago when I went backing packing with my family. We should sleep well tonight because the pistol shrimp are busy at night snapping their claws, which makes a noise like rain falling on the roof – a strange sensation for our temporary underwater house.