by 
July 28, 2017
This morning, I inadvertently awakened at 4:30 am instead of 5:30 am because I forgot my phone had service briefly yesterday and it changed from central back to eastern time. It wouldn’t be a real trip without some type of wake-up time mishap. It was tolerable, though, because I had plenty of time to do my stretches on the deck with the waves crashing around the ship. It was wonderfully calming.
I started watching the port side of the ship for the sunrise to appear, just as it had yesterday. After a bit, I gazed over to the starboard side and saw that the sun was rising on that side. I reflected for a moment and recognized, ‘Oh yeah, we went AROUND the southern tip of Florida and are now coming up on the east coast. I hadn’t traveled all the way around a land mass in this way ever before. I’m hoping that as we get farther north, we will start to see dolphins again. I was bummed that I didn’t see any yesterday, because I want to get more photos of them. Those spotted dolphins’ exuberance calms me and puts a grin on my face. I find that their countless color variations beautiful and truly unique. Some have few spots and are dark, and others have many spots and are otherwise very lightly colored.
I’m so glad my husband drove me back to our house when I realized I had forgotten my GoPro. Dr. Hintz, Christian (one of the crew members) and I rigged it onto the CTD equipment. We captured the descent into the water, the canisters firing shut at 40, 20, 10 and 5 meter depths, and then the ascent back to the surface. We even had a little fish friend swim in front of the camera for a few moments. I can’t wait to get the camera back in the water so we can watch our huge coring equipment plummet to the depths EARLY (again) tomorrow morning.
The drifter we had reassembled yesterday was set out to sea at around 10 pm last night. The night undergrad crew, Dr. Hintz, Dr. Pride and I were all assisting in the drop. It was a perfect execution of the drifter deployment. It was strange to say farewell to him, because we will most likely never see him again. Bon voyage, Drifter Bob Stemseas (we named him aptly for what the drifter does in the water)! The Gulf Stream took him and he’s wandering along peacefully now. Bob has already pinged for the first time, so we know he is operational! He should ping every 12 hours so we can track his location until the battery dies.
That’s it for now! There’s a good chance we will be hitting some storms this weekend, so it could be a bit rough. We are waiting to deploy the next drifter until after we pass through the storms. Hopefully it will happen this weekend or Monday! We should come up with another name for this one. Any recommendations? Leave a comment if you have a fun one.
Your Friend at Sea,
Emily Weigel
