Greetings From J-Reef

Today was our first set back. There was a cold front that came through last night making it very difficult to sleep because of the hard rocking back and forth of the ship due to increased wave action and increased winds. It can be very hard to sleep when the ship rocks one way and then rocks very quickly over the other direction bouncing you off of the wall while you are tying to sleep. The general consensus among the scientists is that no one got much sleep last night.

In the morning the weather was still not favorable for diving, so we did not start operations until after lunch. This gave everyone a little time to catch back up on some sleep that they missed last night.

When the dive team (picture on left) finally got to the dive site they did much more of the same as in previous dives. Rob put down more of his exclusion cages for his experiments. Patrick collected more sponges and Chris collected more sea stars for his on board experiments. Chris also put down some minnow traps baited with tuna fish in order to catch some benthic fishes (fish that live on the bottom) so that these fishes can also be put in the database that Danny is compiling.

Tomorrow we will be at Gray’s Reef for a little while and then we will be returning to J-Reef for the afternoon dives.


Well that is all for now. Hopefully the weather will be better tomorrow. According to the weather report we are supposed to get calm seas for the rest of the week.

Until then,

Ryan