The last few days of a saturation mission always come faster than you expect. Decompression starts tomorrow at 1600. It makes for a busy day for the habitat techs and surface support crew. There are checklists to be done and lots of potting (the method used for bringing items in and out of the habitat to and from the surface).
Scientists on this mission have done a great job. They paid attention during training and have followed all of the rules and guidelines. Thanks Chris, Tiffany, Steve and Tse-Lynn. Great job!
We couldn’t have done this mission without the support of the vessel Freedom Star. Thank you Captain Mike Nicholas and crew. In addition, cudos to Larry Collins, Manager of Diving Operations for the Freedom star, and his dive crew. You guys have done a stellar job. Larry is a former Aquarius Aquanaut, so he knows what is involved in running one of these missions.
It goes without saying that an Aquarius mission would not be possible without the dedication of our topside staff. I’m honored to be a part of the Aquarius team and to work with such a talented and hard working group.
Lastly, I’d like to thank Ryan for a great mission. You’re awesome!
Our mission is beginning to wind down; only one more full dive-day left. The Aquanauts have made significant progress on several fronts. Tiffany’s filtration rate experiment is underway; the first set of measurements have been downloaded from the instruments. It will be a couple of weeks before we can really analyze the data, but it is a good feeling to have the data in hand. We’ve also made good progress on the permanent transects. The three deep sites have all been visited, cleaned, and remarked. Some new sponges (both recruits of Xestospongia muta and newly monitored Geodia neptuni and Agelas conifera) have been tagged, as well. We should get back the these sites on Tuesday afternoon. Much of the past day has been spent setting out sponges for the caging experiment. We managed to set out all 160 sponges at our deep site (95 feet) and about half the sponges at the shallow site (45 feet). We’ll finish up that work tomorrow. The results of our experiments won’t be known for awhile (about a year in the case of the caging experiment), so we’ll keep you posted.
I didn’t write a summary yesterday because we were especially busy. Battery changing took a bit longer than expected, as data dumps from the instrument seemed to drag on and our four hour break wasn’t quite long enough. Actually, if I think about it our break is only about 2.5 hours. Once we stage in from a dive it takes about an hour to fill our tanks, strip out of our gear, and get showered and dry enough to enter the habitat. Then, we need to start gearing up about 30 minutes prior to the next dive. Also, the computer (yes, we’re sharing a single laptop) was occupied as Steve and Tse-Lynn weighed all 320 sponges we need for the caging experiment. Many thanks to them for staying up late to finish that work.
In addition to a busy day, yesterday was an especially tiring day. The current on the reef was howling…screaming…ripping; you choose the word and it applies. Our first indication of the strength of the current was the sound coming in over the communication system from the Pinnacle Gazebo (our remote fill station); you could hear the torrent running through the gazebo. When we arrived on site, the current was strong enough to sweep us out of the gazebo if we didn’t have a good hold. Luckily, the current was a bit better at our sites, which are just down slope from the gazebo. Because the gazebo is on top of a ridge, it tends to have stronger currents than some of the other reef areas. Still, it was an amazing site and experience to crawl from rock to rock against the current. This current lasted most of the dive. After about 4.5 hours, the current started to slack. Unfortunately, behind the current was more bitterly cold water. For this mission, I am diving in a full 5 mm wetsuit over a hooded vest; pretty severe gear for the tropics in August. However, I was still shivering from the cold water being upwelled onto the reef. It was an amazing day of extremes; first the current then the cold. No wonder we were tired.
As the mission winds down it is a good time for some accounting. All told, by the end of the mission, each Aquanaut will have spent about 55 hours of bottom time in the water in about 6.5 days. Not a bad work week. Many thanks to the Aquarius Reef Base staff, the crew of the MV Freedom Star, and (especially) to our Habitat Techs (Mark and Ryan) for making this possible.
One more full dive day, then a short dive on Wednesday. After that, decompression. We knew it couldn’t last forever. That’s probably a good thing; none of us could keep up this schedule for much longer.
We are officially in the last couple days of our underwater stay. Our days have consisted of reluctantly waking at 6:00 am, eating breakfast and drinking coffee..lots and lots of coffee. We are then off for our first dive of the day..six hours worth. It is truly amazing to be able to stay at 95 feet for six hours, with breaks only to fill our tanks (which we do with an extra hose called a fill whip, we don’t even remove our tanks from our backs or our bodies from the water). It is then time for a four hour stay in the habitat for lunch and hopefully a nap. We are then back out on the reef for the final couple hours of our work day, until sunset draws us back in for the night. We take fresh water showers on the wet porch, often while chatting with our fellow aquanauts (not much else you can do living in close quarters), then are dry for the night…hopefully..Our evenings consist of..yup you guessed it, more eating..as you can tell if you have been watching on the live feed, we eat a lot. That is the bulk of our day..dive, eat, sleep.
Some of the more interesting points of being in the habitat are the goliath grouper that feed outside of the view port from sunset to sunrise and will watch us as we watch them. We also see the occasional turtle swimming by and today a snapper with fishing line and a hook dancing back and forth during lunch.
When we are out on the reef and have our heads out of the sand, we have seen a manta ray, spotted eagle rays, sharks, turtles, and an abundance of fish and benthic invertebrates.
Yesterday was a particularly exciting day with ripping currents and very cold water, which combined made us all way to tired to blog. We spent our morning at the pinnacle, where we would grab the gazebo as the current flew us by, hang on for dear life as we filled our tanks, and kicked as hard as possible back to the work site. About the time the current began to subside, the cold water came in and reminded us all that a ripping current is more tolerable than cold water when on the reef for hours at a time.
It’s great to be back in Aquarius on a mission. It’s the first science mission of the year and things are running smoothly so far.
Ryan LaPete is on his first full mission as a habitat Tech. He has completed a staff sat, which last only a few days, so he’ll have more time for learning the various emergency procedures and habitat systems during this saturation. He’s doing a fine job so far.
When things slow down, it’s interesting to watch the parade of marine life that moves about the Aquarius. The large groupers and a sea turtle, who makes nocturnal visits, are big hits. You can’t help but notice the daily struggle the reef creatures endure. There are a number of yellowtail snappers with part of their tail fins missing, no doubt from a close encounter with a barracuda. There’s also a lucky creole wrasse that escaped the jaws of some predator, evidenced by the toothy scar encircling his body. He’s the won that got away.
This morning we awoke to some rather loud bumping sounds against the habitat hull. The current was very strong, so I had to wonder if something had broken loose outside. Turns out it was the very large groupers booming their air bladders and rubbing against the hull. I’m not sure if they were in a feeding frenzy, but they were fired up over something…
That’s all for now from Aquarius, the world’s only operational underwater research habitat!
Before we could be recognized as full fledged Aquanauts, we have to be completely saturated, which entails spending 24 hours underwater. ‘Aquanaut candidates’ for the previous week, our wait to officially become ‘Aquanauts’ was almost over. With training complete and final mission approval granted, we waited on the R/V Research Diver for orders to begin our descent. We took in the sunshine and sights of the surface as we prepared ourselves for a very different kind of dive – we would not be returning to the surface for 10 days.
After receiving the go-ahead, we donned our gear and began our descent. Within minutes we were at the gateway to Aquarius – the wet porch. The wet porch serves as the entry and exit point, storage place and fill station for our specialized SCUBA rigs- 100ft3 doubles with a 50lb lift bladder and 2 regulators. We parked our rigs and began a tour of our new home. We found that Aquarius offers many amenities of a modern-day home, with a few interesting adaptations to the underwater environment. My favorite is the use of chamois instead of towels – think Sham-Wow commercial. Another obvious difference is the food. Dehydrated packaged ‘camping’ meals are preferred because they can be stored for long periods of time, are easy to transport underwater, and provide the calories required for long underwater excursions.
After a quick lunch of dehydrated ‘chili cheese mac’ we got right to work. First order of business was installing 80 cages at 95 feet. A daunting task given the limitations of SCUBA from the surface, the advantage of saturation diving makes this type of work possible. While a typical dive from the surface may average 40 – 60 min, we have up to 6 hours of dive time per excursion and up to 9 hours total available per day. When we get low on air we pull into the wet-porch, connect our specialized quick-connect fill whips, and top off the tanks. Another advantage of the long continuous hours spent underwater is the marine life. Somehow, on the reef, the marine life are everywhere! We spotted 2 eagle rays and a couple of turtles on our first excursion. It felt a little strange to look up at the surface from 90ft and realize we would not breech that water-air interface after our day’s dive. The Habitat would be our home and haven for the duration of this mission.
After our excursion we ate dinner and watched the fish from the kitchen viewport (we don’t call it a porthole because you don’t want to open this window!). Correct that – the fish watched us eat dinner. It definitely feels like we are in an aquarium down here. We settled into our bunks and called it a night – after a day in Aquarius, we would officially be considered aquanauts in the morning!