34°25.79'N, 127°31.63'W

Today we are traveling toward our next dive site (D4) which we are scheduled to arrive at around midnight.

This unusual squid is probably in the genus Galiteuthis, but has the ability to do something that we have never seen a squid do - look straight ahead! We were able to get some remarkable video footage of this animal before moving on to our next transect. 

We recovered the vehicle at 1900 hours on March 15th and here you can see the pilots Buck Reynolds and Dan Chamberlain talking to each other and enjoying the moment while Tim Pennington waits in the hallway (you can see his feet).

This extremely large lobate ctenophore is a species that George Matsumoto and Bruce Robison described from Monterey Bay several years ago. The scientific name is Kiyohimea usagi.

Steve Haddock gets in a little exercise on the stair master during the day.

34°21.57'N, 127°41.89'W

We are cruising along at about 9 knots with the winds holding steady at 21 knots. The seas are much calmer today than they have been for the past few days. The crew are up and working but many of the science party didn't make it to breakfast this morning as there are no immediate science tasks at hand. Francisco is going to try and run an extra CTD station today as we are currently scheduled to arrive at our next planned station at midnight and this is a little early. At this station we hope to run a CTD station, go blue-water SCUBA diving, and complete a 6 hour ROV dive before moving on. We prefer to run the diving operations during the day and the CTD station will only take two hours, so we are about 5-6 hours ahead of schedule.

We crossed the EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone) last night which is set at 200 miles (320 km) offshore. We are still in the California Current though, the water temperature at the surface is still only 12.2C and the salinity is 32.8 parts per thousand. We are running the towfish behind the boat as we cruise Ginger and Steve are busy watching and maintaining the instruments. The iron and aluminum measurements are still low.

Dr. George I. Matsumoto

0930 hours

We are going to be stopping to let Francisco run a CTD station here. It is amazing that we are so far out and still within the California Current. The swells have calmed down enough that most of the science crew are getting some work done now. The latest NCAA results were forwarded to Francisco from his son - Thanks Cisco!

1430 hours

34°03.78'N, 128°25.74'W

We've just finished up a CTD station here and are continuing on our way towards Hawaii with only ~1700 nautical miles to go! We are crossing a timeline tonight so we'll be setting our clocks back one hour. We have two more of these changes to go before we hit Hawaii. It's great to have an extra hour of sleep no matter where we are! The crew are taking the time change over a period of three watches (20 minutes extra per watch) so that one group doesn't have an extra hour added onto their watch. Perfect timing. The winds are still pretty high (~20 knots) but the sky is blue and there is a beautiful albatross that has been following us for the past two days.

Steve Haddock took this photo, he currently has five Gaussia in the lab and is going to try and keep them alive until Hawaii. These are normally intensely bioluminescent copepods, he is curious if they lose this ability over time.

Steve Haddock took this photograph of our current position so those of you without a navigation map can make better sense of the latitude and longitude positions that I've been sending back. We are ~650 km west of Los Angeles right now heading towards Hawaii.

Steve Haddock also took this picture and inserted the legend. To help you out with his question, he is bunking with Darrell Palmer - Chief Mate of the boat. You get two guesses as to which is Steve's bunk and which is Darrell's.