Day 5 – Weather strikes
Menu:
Breakfast
- Avocado and egg quesadilla
- Ginger salsa
- French toast
- Yogurt
- Fresh fruit
- Fresh muffins
- Bacon, sausage and spam
Lunch
- Leafy bean soup
- Pork adobo
- Chinese chicken salad
- Ravioli casserole
- Steamed rice
- Green beans
Dinner
- Vegetable pasta with chili sauce
- Yellowtail steaks
- Garlic rice
- Salad bar
- Mint chocolate chip ice cream
Weather
Windy – up to 30 knot winds! Waters choppy, skies overcast with some rain.
Position
Heading back to shore…
Extracting Jason from the water today was a bit rough; the seas really kicked up last night, and Jason and Medea were blown off course last night due to high winds. We’re heading back in to land this afternoon; unfortunately one of our crew members is sick and has to be transported back. Due to the weather, we wouldn’t have been able to dive again tonight anyway. So it’ll be a quiet night for us on the Thompson, and we’ll hope to be back out with Jason underwater tomorrow night.
In the meantime, we had an interesting catch last night, with some huge Isidids, covered in intersting flora and fauna. They were all bamboo coral, which consist of large fingerlike skeletons connected by organic joints. These were so old, though, that the carbonate had grown over the joints – it was too big to be supported by the tissue, so the whole thing fused together. We also brought in a giant black coral covered in ophyroids – the sea stars serve a cleaning purpose, keeping large amounts of sediment and detritus from smothering the organism. There’s also a large predatory worm we found – it sits waiting in corals for unsuspecting animals to be caught in its jaws. Our coral catch was small today, although we managed to find quite a bit of live coral, which Ron is currently keeping in saltwater tanks in the holding bay.
We hope to get a dredge done tomorrow morning on A1; a dredge is less accurate in terms of a depth range, but it brings up a much larger payload than Jason can.
December 19th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
Adam – pretty awesome. I have been looking at weather pattern but failed to see the storm that kicked up. Hope the weather settles down and the crew member gets well soon. The blogs are fun to read.
December 21st, 2008 at 3:26 am
creepy worm