Well JP called it, it started raining on us at about sunrise and has been doing so off and on. Combine that with 30 knot winds, 6-8 foot seas and you have quite the weather for working outside on an oceanographic research vessel. As has been stated, we are on 12 hour shifts; I (Reide) was lucky enough to get the midnight to noon shift. Although I don't think most of the "senior" people are really going off shift much. THat can take a toll on you...I mean look at the picture of JP for heaven's sake. After some rest, JP and I did manage to plan out next few stations. Over the last 12 hours, we have occupied about 4 different stations; dropping the CTD and collecting water samples, coring, and most importantly ALL of the tripods are now deployed. Cross your fingers...we hope to recover those beauties in about 4 months with loads of wonderful data! With all the tripods now safely on the ocean floor, we will turn our focus to just the CTD and multicore. We hope to knock several stations out in the next seeral hours...the weather is only suppose to get worse and the waves get bigger. Great, who called for that forecast? Time for me to head to my bunk...let the ship rock me to sleep!
Congratulations on the Tripod Deployments! Way to go with getting the tricky, delicate operations out of the way. It'll make mud seem so simple.
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