Senior Thesis Cruise Day 1
By Nicole
12/29
Today we woke up and mustered in the main lab, preparing to unpack the supplies meticulously packed by Kathy (one of our instructors) a few months ago before the ship left Seattle. After we unpacked, we all prepped our supplies in the various labs for once we got our first samples. Still at port, we spent our time doing various tasks to prepare for sample collection and processing or securing things.
We all took a break to enjoy R/V Thompson lunch, then we had a safety briefing with the captain and crew and donned our immersion suits (nicknamed "gumby suits") to ensure they fit. We were supposed to leave port around noon, but there was a large tanker at the fueling dock and we ended up needing to wait until ~4:30 PM to leave port after successfully fueling. Fun fact, the R/V Thompson can hold up to 280,000 gallons of gas and consumes up to 4,100 gallons while steaming at 12.5 knots.
We saw a green sea turtle off the side of the ship while in port!
There are so many different projects on board and everyone is doing something different! Maddy did several bucket samples around the harbor and began filtering them in the incubation room. The marine geology and geochemistry (MG&G) group was preparing to get the multibeam data, and sleeping as much as possible before it started. Ginger and Jessica are working on getting the Seaflow (sensor that gets underway cyanobacteria data from boat water) working, which has proven difficult without Francois, who was left in Hawaii.
After we had dinner, we went out to get a CTD briefing and prepped the bottles for the test CTD, then went back into the computer lab to watch the live data stream from the sensors. While other folks went to bed to prepare for their new watch schedule shifts, zooplankton people stayed up to deploy the zooplankton net and manta net (net that glides along the surface of the water aimed to catch microplastics). The first watch started at midnight, but they were able to go to bed early because the multibeam transects hadn't started yet.
