Pulley Ridge

Hi Friends,

Mike and Casey goofing around on decompression.

I'm now safely back in Miami after a fortnight's adventure at sea was cut short by 3 days due to the impending tropical storm/hurricane Isaac that was coming in from the Caribbean.  Overall it was a successful trip and it is the first of about 5 trips that I will be taking for this project.  As I might have said before, the capacity to which I was a part of the team was as the support diver for the rebreather dives.  The way I work as a support diver is by getting the team in their gear which includes a rebreather, lift bags, reels of line, clips, hoses, 3 extra stage deco bottles they clip onto their left sides (see the photo from the last post), and collection tools.  Each of the four divers has the configuration slightly different so although the beginning phase was slow, I was setting them all up in a flash by the end of it.

Rebreather team

I honestly don't really know much about the science that was going on during this research cruise.  I do know that the rebreather team, other than the three dives it took to set up the instruments on the moorings as mentioned a couple posts back, were diving to collect samples of specific fish, corals, sponges, and algae.

Me on deco, photo credit Casey

Yes, the cruise was a success all things considered.  Sure we had to go home 3 days early and cut our productivity, but for the time we were out there we were working very hard and very well together.

I got home Saturday evening and spent that night and all day Sunday with Christina at home taking shelter from Tropical Storm Isaac as we were hit with rain.  She had work today but when she got there they told everyone to go home after an hour or two because it was too rough to take any boats out and a little too dicey to be taking down all the hurricane shutters yet.  So... she came back home to me and we're spending time together by finishing a movie we started yesterday, making dinner, learning more salsa moves, and now reading.  Well, she's reading while I'm posting this update.

We had up to 10 silky sharks at a time.

Work is going to kick off tomorrow in full swing.  As I've mentioned, we're teaching two classes this semester (same course but 2 different sections) so it will be much more demanding than ever before.  Tomorrow the students are not having their pool session tomorrow since we need to go over a few lecture sessions before we can get them in the water so the whole day will be spent getting everything situated for the semester ahead such as packing everything away from the cruise and figuring out space for all of the new gear that we had to purchase to accommodate the double enrollment.

Sharks all around us!

The semester ahead will be busy so I hope I find time here and there to keep everyone updated!