It's hard to keep track of dates now because we track our dives and data by j-day which (because it's based in England) rolls over to the next date at 2 p.m. here. Right now it's 6 p.m. Thursday in the galley, but Friday in England and in the control room where we work. A dive that starts in the afternoon like Monday's Dive 302 on Kohala) end up sharing the j-day (114) with Tuesday morning's dive 303 on Puna Ridge. Then Tuesday afternoon's dive occurs on j-day 115. Maybe it just seems confusing when you're tired and the ship is rearing up.

We ran to some equipment problems--always a challenge when working at sea and had to return to Honolulu this morning for repairs. A specialist was called; the equipment was fixed and we're now heading back out to sea again.

Being in port gave some of us the opportunity to get some exercise (happily I'd brought my mask and snorkel) so several of us got into the water to look at nearshore fishes. An hour swimming in warm water felt great! Now we're all ready to get back to work at sea!

The break in our diving schedule gave us a chance to clean up the wet lab on the ship, take nine buckets of rocks to our storage site at the dock. It was also a perfect time to review the framegrabs (the individual frames of video) of animals we've seen on our dives and check identifications and discuss the distribution of animals and geological features. As a biologist, I appreciate these discussions and the geologists' and geochemists' and geophysicist's perspectives.

We sent four pallets after Leg 2, some 2700 pounds of basalt and corals. Here Rendy Keaten, left, and Jenny Paduan are packaging up one of the pallets on the dock.

-Connor

We didn't dive today because the ship needed repairs. We went snorkeling in Hanauma Bay on Oahu, an explosion crater that is one of the rejuvenated stage volcanic features on Oahu (Diamond Head is the most famous). It is right next to Koko Head, another rejuvenated stage cone, whose submarine flanks we dove on the first day of Leg 2.

We hiked down into the crater interior, along a thick section of bedded pycroclastic material. It looked remarkably like the submarine outcrops we saw on Koko Head. This outcrop also included fragments of coral torn from an ancient reef by the explosions of the volcano that erupted through it.

We worked to catch up on generating several products from our dive data.

After each dive, we have a program that generates a list of samples collected, complete with position information and framegrabs from the video. This is a page of the list from dive number 303 on Puna Ridge (4/24). We have found these lists to be very useful for figuring out which sample is which when they get sorted from the ROV's sample drawer after the dives. The lists also serve as web forms for loading the samples' information into a database on shore.

I also create maps of sampling locations using GIS. This map is of the dive on Puna Ridge (4/24). Each sample is identified on the map, along with other points of interest marked during the dive.

Dave sieved about a billion sediment core samples. We will analyze the volcanic glasses in the sand with electron and ion microprobes to determine eruption conditions and the components of the melt. We also packed 9 buckets of rocks, half a pallet, and stored them away until we return to port and can ship them off next week.