Almost there!!!

So the same night I wrote my last post, I CAUGHT A BLOWFISH!!! It was the most unexpected thing, and definitely a highlight to this cruise. I caught it with the giant net, but they made me throw it back because it was rare and we felt bad for it when it kept puffing up....but on the way back to the water, I think we knocked it out because it made an awful sound when it hit the surface...I hope it's OK.
Little did I know that touring Costa Rica would consist of working on the boat, packing and cleaning, while making tiny day trips when we have time...we'll make it work though.

I just posted more pictures, which if you click on them will direct you to my captions as well....Ok, that is all, I have soooo much data to work on...and then our 2 AM cast. Oh and I just noticed this blog is an hour behind, so there's no point trying to nap, dang!

Down to the Wire - and tastes like it

Six days and a wake up!! We are all planning our trips, which all include stayin at an all-inclusive hotel in which the science party will have one last hora together! Then we plan to zip-line (and see the rain forest), white-water raft, and SLEEP!!!! But we are planning the logistics now...

You can see every night people get more excited to get to the end of the road (or water in this case) every day. The food is also coming down to the wire, and the meals have become a highlight just because of the nap I plan after every single one. The hot tub failed last night in taking away my aches and pains, and I cannnnoooooottttt wait to sleep in a real bed!!! Well, I think I have work to do or something...and then we have the last cast in cycle 4 and then on to our last cycle. I am taking pictures of everything now, so I can explain everything that we do on this boat, and I'm getting some good action shots of me working/filtering water, so be excited to see them when I come home!

same old same old

There really is nothing new to report or talk about. We are on a pretty consistent schedule of filtering water and running our incubations. They have a hot tub on board, which is pretty much a big box of warm sea water - but it takes the aches and pains away of constantly working or sleeping in the hardest beds known to man. I'm pretty much done fly fishing, because we caught all the numbers of different species (which out here means two) that we need to cut open. The one fun activity we do have is decorating styrofoam cups that shrink to very tiny size when they are dropped to 3000 meters, because of the pressure. That's about it!!! We are 8 days and a wake up away from being on land....but seriously, no one on board is counting ;)

We are traveling to our new cycle...yay, time to SLEEP!!! Soo underrated! I just walked outside the boat with another student and somehow stumbled our way to the front of the ship without falling overboard in the dark. As the boat is moving, you can see shiney "lightning bugs" in the water - bioluminescence! I'd take a picture and show you, but I don't think that a picture would really depict what I saw...and I'd be afraid to drop my camera overboard.

I get back to the states on the 30th and then I'm going to spend a week in Norristown for the week, before going back to Maine. So, family, if you want to get together before I'm back home (probably Christmas) talk to my mom now!!! K, I'm gonna go get 8 HOURS OF SLEEP!!!! WOW!

Two weeks left!

Wow, we officially have two weeks left in this cruise - time is flying by! With the 2 AM casts and the two different set of incubations (Si enrichment, and trace metal enrichment) we are keeping super busy - doing what else, but filtering the water!!! The data we are getting from this cruise is really interesting and keeps us going with the many experiments. At this rate, two weeks will feel like two days .....or maybe not. Time on this ship is definitely an odd concept, and I wouldn't be able to tell you if it was morning or night if the ship didn't have windows. Well, back to work...bye!

Now that the cycles have begun, we have a steady schedule. 2 AM CTD tow, which means we are filtering water until 5, then we have to run the chlorophyll from the previous morning. Every other day we are filtering even more water from the incubation experiments - so we are filtering a lot of water everyday!!! At night I get to sit back and relax with the giant net going flying fish fishing (I caught another one last night!!!). There are so many different experiments going on during this cruise, that we should even be able to explain every aspect of the Costa Rica Dome....

Every sunrise and sunset out here is so different and beatiful everyday! I can finally say I've seen a dolphin too! We just had Thanksgiving dinner tonight, and I think I'm going to take another nap before our 2AM cast. I'll work on posting more pictures, but really the pictures will be "Look, there's the ocean from this side of the boat!" and "Oh, and there's the ocean from the other side of the boat....."

Boooo Transects

Anyone who's been on a research cruise will agree that transects blow. We just spent four days traveling around a section of the Costa Rica Dome taking water samples every three hours. Since there are three of us in our group (Joaquim, Ali, and I), we really couldn't work out shifts that allow more than 3-4 hours at a time. We just finished this morning!!! Now we start our cycle 2, which includes the 2 AM casts. Also, we are going to start incubations tonight as well. For those who don't know what that is, an incubation is basically taking a sample of water and separating it in its own container and adding certain trace metals to see what the limiting factors are.

On a separate note, there is a PhD student from Hawaii who brought a giant net to catch flying fish in...everyone thought there is no way it would ever work, but I took yet another stab at it last night and caught one!!! Definitely made my night. But when I went back to try again, I was reprimanded from one of the crew men for being too aggressive with the net, because he thought I would fall over. The pole is really big and I'm really small, so I guess watching me yield this pole would be a little concerning. Perhaps next time I'll tie my torso to the boat as well as the net so he will feel extra comfort....

Process of Pouring Water on a Boat

believe it or not, pouring water into a smaller container on a boat can be difficult, so here is my published procedure of pouring water. 1) Leave the open container leaning on the size of the container you want to pour into. 2) Gently let the rock of the boat pour the water for you 3) If the boat rock rocks the other way DO NOT GET AGGRESSIVE and tip the bottle, or you WILL drench your work station! 4) Not having patience blows, so you better find them somewhere!!

In the past couple of days, glass has not been my friend! So the small amber CDOM bottles cannot be put in the -80 freezer, because they will shatter! oops The test tubes we had transported here did not have a friendly flight, so they will shatter when trying to put a cap on, oops. And finally (sorry Elin!) one of our very nice, very expensive cuvettes did not like the rock of the boat, so the top is a little....missing. I think it would still be able to be used in the fluorometer, but as of now we are using the non-shattered one (yes we are a very smart bunch).

We just had two days off in our transit picking up Joaquim and returning to the dome, so I caught up on my sleep and am ready to spend the 12 - 13 hours after we start are transect (approximately at 22:00 tonight) filtering water. We just found the spectrophotometer, so we can also run more samples than we thought on this cruise. Needless to say, buh bye free time!!! This is good though, being on a boat with nothing to do is brutal!!! I think I'll go take a nap now....rough life!

I went fishing last night and caught 8 squid! They inked on me, but then we cut them open so we were pretty even. Also, I guess I'll be nocturnal during this trip, because sleeping from 7 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon feels amazing with the 2:00 AM water sampling. I'm starting to get into a rhythm which is going well, but I'll be interested to see how things will change once Joaquim (my boss) gets here.

We are officially at sea! Apparently our group is running samples from 2 - 6 AM, so I'm really happy I packed a bunch of those mini energy drinks. We don't start sampling until midnight on tomorrow, so we have the whole day to ourselves, in which I'm hoping we can get some sample water and practice. Also, I'll get some of the pictures up tomorrow, because I want to sleep right now...buh bye!

So the internet is brutal on the ship, and I'm on a special computer to write this. I won't have the internet access that I thought I would have, so we'll see if that changes over the course of the cruise. I'm on the ship, set up my equipment, and taught some people how to speak Keebler, so I'm well on my way to making this official! We don't leave port until Tuesday, so I may have some free time to get the last bits of alcohol in my bloodstream for the next 5 weeks...Once the computer's system is up and running, I'll have pictures!! The sights are amazing here, so you're just gonna have to wait to see amazing coastlines and really cool equipment (probably only cool if you're a geologist...) Ok, I need to go catch up to my studies now...bye!

So this trip started off with a bang because the first American song I heard as the plane was taking off was Tik Tok...So the fact that it was pouring when we got off the plane and the fact that our taxi driver almost killed us on the way to our hotel doesn't matter! Apparently our ship is already loaded up, so the next two days will be just hanging out in Costa Rica, getting in my last drops of alcohol, and and trying not to get bitten by a malaria filled mosquito....that is all