As the mushrooms saute on the stove behind them, you can see Rob Sherlock and Doug Alexander in the ship galley. This is from the night of March 16th when Rob served up his tasty Pilaf a la Sherlock. Since then, Rob, Kevin Raskoff, and Steve Haddock have been volunteering to clean up and do the dishes in the evening - as thanks for some incredible meals that we've been enjoying.

Taken from the RHIB (Rigid Hull Inflatable Boat) by "Captain" Shawn Osborn, the four intrepid bluewater divers pose for a shot after our dive with the Western Flyer in the background.

We saw some interesting animals in between our transects, this squid is likely a juvenile with the long frilled 'tail' being resorbed as the animal gets older.

Here is a great shot of the Western Flyer hulls taken by the ROV Tiburon during recovery.

We are steaming towards Hawaii at 9.7 knots and the seawater temperature is getting warmer (currently at 15.1 C). We are in a fog bank right now and the weather reports are looking rather grim. It looks like there is a storm brewing and due to hit us in the next day or so. We had a great day yesterday. We got on station and ran a CTD station from 0700 hours to 0900 hours and then launched the ROV. After the launch, the divers got into the water and had a bluewater dive that was actually in BLUE water! Visibility was over 30 meters and the upper water column was teeming with life. We collected several different types of animals like salps, siphonophores, and ctenophores. We saw a few fish, mostly larval fish hanging around the salps for protection. The ROV dive was also interesting with some distinct zonation of animals and almost nothing below 700 meters. We ended the day working up all the data that we collected.

Sunday (March 18th) is scheduled as a steaming day although we may try and run a CTD station if time and weather permit.

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We are now about 850 nautical miles from Moss Landing on a straight line
towards Hawaii.

March 18, 2001 Day 6
33 44.27N, 134 13.01W

We are cruising along with a planned stop at 13:00 hours to run a CTD station. The water got up to almost 16C but has dropped back down to 15.25 C. We are thinking about going for a bluewater SCUBA dive while they are running a CTD station, we'll see what happens. We are still in a fog bank. It's odd to think that we are out here in the middle of the Pacific blowing a fog horn. Who is out here to hear it? The weather that we were fearing now looks like it is heading north of us so we may just catch the tail end of the storm rather than going through the middle.