A Day In The Life Of An Aquanaut
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.
Well, folks, time to head back out there…