It’s 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon and we are getting close to La Paz, where the Chavez team will disembark. The crew and the ship, however, will be continuing on to the next leg of the Gulf of California expedition with a new group of scientists, the Midwater Ecology Group, in a few days.
Another busy day. I often mention the schedule we have of dawn, noon, dusk, and midnight casts but in reality, those four cast times are only the main events of each day.
We’ve almost made it through the second day. We’re tired and hot (it’s been in the high 80s (F) every day, and even warmer inside the lab), but generally pleased with how smoothly we’re getting through the work.
It’s 9:30 p.m. on our first day at the time-series station. Fifteen hours ago we were all on deck, ready to begin our dawn cast.
After our nightly meeting and a presentation by Martín Hernández, the group’s focus shifted to preparation for the continuous experiments that will begin tomorrow, literally at the crack of dawn.
At about 1:00 p.m. we reoccupied another GOC 2012 site and made our first pump cast on this expedition.
Although we crossed into a different time zone today (we are now in Mountain Time), the Western Flyer has no need to change its clocks an hour ahead.
After just one day in port, the scientists were ready to get moving and back to science. Therefore, no one was too pleased when our fuel truck was delayed, pushing our departure back.
We arrived in Ensenada early this morning and began the process of clearing the R/V Western Flyer through Mexican customs. The process went smoothly and Francisco Chavez was able to make it off the boat in time for his talk at El Caracol—the soon-to-be maritime museum of Ensenada where he spoke about the Gulf of California 2015 expedition.
Today was an unusual day for the scientists aboard the Western Flyer—we made no new casts and spent the entire day in transit. Travelling at about 10 nautical miles per hour since leaving M1 yesterday, we are now off the coast of San Diego.
Like many of you reading this cruise log, I am not a scientist and I’ve never been on a research expedition before. Needless to say, boarding the Western Flyer—an MBARI research vessel named for the sardine boat that John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts took to the Sea of Cortez in 1940—this morning was rather surreal.
Research programs at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) encompass the entire ocean, from the surface waters to the deep seafloor, and from the coastal zone to the open sea. The need to understand the ocean in all its complexity and variability drives MBARI's research and development efforts.