TIME 1051

Hey folks! Well, yesterday was a pretty slow day; in fact by the evening, I had gotten bored. But just when things were looking exceptionally dull, they brightened up tremendously. Kevin Fisk, the chief engineer on Atlantis, took us on a tour of the Engine Room. It was awesome. Not only did we get cool yellow-and-blue earplugs that made us look totally slick and professional, but the Engine Room was very, very loud and very, very cool. Not only did we see all six engines, but Kevin was an excellent tour guide and told us how everything works — well at least as best as us non-engineers could understand it.

The prop on this ship is 9 feet in diameter. That is crazy huge! It's amazing. This ship holds a quarter of a million gallons of fuel and can make its own water. Incredible! I suppose that a ship has to have all of those capabilities to stay at sea for extended periods of time, but still, it's pretty cool stuff. There were so many buttons and switches and things, it looked like something out of a movie. It was spectacular.

After our tour and newly acquired expertise, I headed back upstairs away from the noise and went to check out the CTD cast that Bekki Helton and Kurt Williamson were working on. (You all know Kurt by now since he answered the tons of questions you sent in to him. He's a pretty popular guy from the looks of things!). The CTD (conductivity, temperature, and depth) is this giant cylinder with different containers in it that you can remotely control via computer from the ship and tell it when to sample. This allows a scientist to get CTDs at different depths. It's pretty awesome how sophisticated it is — a far cry from the old days when you had to drop weights down the line to take the samples at certain depths. These days you get instantaneous data right on the computer screen in front of your very eyes.

Since I had been inside since the afternoon when the sub came up, I was completely unaware of the weather change. It was like a monsoon out there. It was pouring and the winds were racing! When I stepped outside, the CTD was down. There was a light shining in the water so you could see the line. The water was so choppy and rough that the waves were coming up above the edge of the ship. There were white caps everywhere. The coolest thing though was that since the light was shining in the water, squid were coming up to the surface where they found flying fish. The squid were chasing the flying fish. The escape tactic that the flying fish use is to jump out of the water and fly away from the squid. This would be a cool thing to watch on a normal day, but since it was so rough and windy last night, the flying fish were seriously flying when they came out of the water. It was like they were being launched out of cannons. As soon as the emerged from the water, the winds would pick them up and fly them so high they went out of sight and then they would fall back into the water with a plop and create a huge splash.

Ever since I first saw some flying fish on the transit down here, I have been dying to see one up close and really look at it. I've seen pictures before, but there is something quite fascinating about a fish that has "wings" and can fly. The wings are really just big fins that are shaped like wings. They don't actually have feathers or anything like that. Then, my wish came true — all of a sudden one of the fish was launched into the air and flew up onto the deck of the ship!

Laura Zirelli, a tech from the Desert Research Institute in Reno, and I were totally jazzed about this fish. We ran over to try and pick it up and save it. As fish do, it kept flopping around and when we got our hands on it, it squirmed back out. Apparently it was pretty entertaining for everyone who was watching us because when it would jump, we would jump. Now I can honestly say that no creature from the water scares me, but every time it would jump, I would jump back. I guess it's a reflex. Then I would just laugh at myself. Finally, I was able to get a good enough grip on the fish to carry it across the deck and throw it back in the water. Unfortunately, I was too late. When I threw it back in the water, it didn't swim away. Poor fish! Of course, not as poor as another fish that got launched right into the side of the boat. This sight elicited an "ouch" from everyone who was watching.

Then it was time to bring the CTD back on board the ship, so we all put on our rain jackets, hard hats, life vests, and steel-toed boots. I looked "hot"! (That was sarcastic, by the way). The rain jacket was about 20 sizes too big and the boots weren't so snazzy-looking on me. I didn't care though. It was awesome being out there. The wind was howling and the rain was smacking against our faces. We got some cool video of it that I am sending your way, so be sure to check it out.

Soaked and wide awake at 12:15 a.m., we headed back inside and decided to have a little foosball game. My partner and I beat the other team five games in a row. It was so hard to play though because the ship was really, really rocking! I had a hunch last night that this would be a bad sign for the dive the next morning. So this morning when I woke up and the ship was still rolling all over the place, I was almost certain they didn't launch. I woke up and headed upstairs to the main lab to find out that there were 25-knot winds with gusts up to 29 knots and the dive for today was cancelled. This means that we lose a dive on the cruise, but hopefully the rest of the dives will be productive enough to get everything done we planned to get done out here! So that's all the news from here. Pat Hickey, the expedition leader, just walked in and informed me that the winds are still pretty strong: currently 25 knots.