Hawaii Cruise Logbook

March 15, 2001: Leg 1; Day 3

Expeditions 2001
March
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April
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June
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We are at 35 degrees 37.19' N 124 degrees 33.01' W at a CTD station late on March 14th. The winds are holding steady at 27 knots and the swells are still substantial. We are still hoping for calmer weather in the morning so that we can dive. I'll send another update later in the day.

Cheers
George

mar15_brian.jpg (40617 bytes)Second mate Brian Ackerman keeping a close eye on the ship and the weather while Captain Ian Young talks on the phone to Director of Marine Operations Steve Etchemendy.

 

Captain Ian Young talks to Director of Marine Operations Steve Etchemendy about the rough weather and the Cruise Web Pages while Francisco Chavez looks on.

 

Steve Fitzwater keeps awake between stations reading a novel. Stations are every three hours which isn't enough time to get good sleep, but you can grab a quick nap like Paul Chua.

Atma is processing water samples between stations so even the time between stations is busy for some of the crew.

 

 

Francisco Chavez enjoys one of the games on the computer while Tim Pennington and Kim Reisenbichler check their email. We do have limited email contact and look forward to news from home.

March 15th 0700 hours

Another bumpy night. We are now at 35 degrees 27.18'N and 124 degrees 54.16W and holding station 300 kms from Moss Landing (~170 miles) while we evaluate the sea state. The winds got up to 32 knots last night and are now holding steady at 29 knots. This morning at 0200, we ran a CTD station to 3000 meters; there is still a lot of plankton at the surface as Atma has to filter the bongo net samples at each station. 

35 11.78N; 125 34.79W

1200 hours and we are moving across the Pacific. Bruce Robison and Dale Graves evaluated the moonpool situation and decided that it was too rough to launch the ROV this morning. The next CTD station is not for another 24 hours so we will continue our way towards Hawaii and if the weather calms down, we may stop for a ROV dive. Right now the wind is holding steady at 26 knots, the swell is calming down. We are going to stop right now and open up the moonpool again to evaluate launching conditions.

George

Chief Scientist Bruce Robison and Chief Pilot Dale Graves look into the moonpool early in the morning and decide to postpone the dive.

 

 

 

Paul Tucker at the controls of the crane smiles at photographer Rob Sherlock

 

 

 

 

 

 

1230 hours

We're going diving with the ROV!!

1243 hours
35°10.17'N, 125°36.22'W

We are on station diving with the ROV!! The sun has come out and the winds are slowly decreasing (holding around 20 knots now) and the swells are down as well. We have just completed 15 minute transects at 100 m, 200 m, and 300 m and are on our way down to 400 m. There are huge amounts of what we call 'spiders' out here, they are really isopods (related to your pillbug or sowbug or rollypolly) that are well adapted to midwater life. Tonight we will celebrate Francisco Chavez and his wife (Aurora)'s 21st wedding anniversary (shhhh - he doesn't know it yet).

--George