Then they were Aquanauts
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!