Hey everyone! I am so excited to tell you about my day yesterday. As many of you may already know, I dove in Alvin yesterday. It was the most incredible experience of my life. Not many people can say that one of their childhood dreams actually came true. It's a pretty special thing. I was not nervous at all. One school out there is doing an experiment on everyone's heart rate right before they dive, and mine wasn't really all that high at all, only 84 or 88 or something. That is nothing compared to everyone else. Most seem to fall at least over 100. And usually I am the type of person who gets all worked up when I'm about to do something exciting. I expected to be a little nervous, but mostly excited. I was just totally calm. I'm not saying I wasn't excited, but my body wasn't all excited. My heart wasn't racing or anything. For the duration of the dive, I was as calm as I ever have been in my entire life. It was almost like an eight-hour meditation.

So, the dive. I was very lucky that the water was the calmest it has been for any launch yet. We moved around in the waves a little bit, but there really weren't any waves to bob us around a lot. I was diving with Bruce Strickrott, the pilot, and Dr. Peggy O'Day from Arizona State University. Once Bruce started the dive, it was incredibly smooth. It didn't even feel like we were moving. The water was a crystal blue. There weren't really any creatures in sight on the way down except jellies.

After a few minutes, the blue turned to black, and we couldn't see anything at all. Bruce flickered the strobe lights to see some bioluminescence, so that was cool. In order to save power, though, he only did it a couple of times. We spent the rest of the ride down getting prepped for the dive, going over the dive plan, and chatting. The cool thing about the sub is that it has a CD player in it, so Bruce was changing the CDs, providing us with some great music to listen to throughout most of the dive. Once we reached the seafloor, all I saw at first was basalt. It was pretty cool. It looked hard and lumpy. You could tell it was hardened and not fresh. It was sort of clumpy, and it just looked so barren down there. I couldn't imagine that I would see anything living.

We zoomed over to one of the vents to start our work and suddenly saw tons of life. Throughout the course of the dive, I saw an octopus, shrimp, fish, eel-like fish, anemones, Riftia, mussels, Pompeii worms, clams, crabs, and this lobster-relative guy that looked like it was just a lobster tail with feet. We also saw chimneys with black smoke billowing out of them. Before we reached the chimneys, we could tell that we were near them because we started to see smoke in the water. It was incredible. We went to an area called TICA that was filled with Riftia. It looked almost like a flower garden. It was incredible! I'm sitting here trying to explain what it was like to you, but there really aren't words to describe it. The most amazing part is knowing that you are going to a place where only a small handful of people have ever been. It's a tremendous feeling to know that most people will never get to experience what you are experiencing. It's very humbling. You feel very small when you see what the Earth can form and very large from the amazing experience all at the same time. It's the greatest feeling.

The dive lasted about eight hours. We returned to the surface around 1600 to find pretty smooth waters again. We bobbed around a little more on the recovery than on the launch, but it wasn't bad at all. The sub was surrounded by jellies that actually stung one of the divers — an occupational hazard. When the sub was pulled up out of the water and placed on the deck, it was still surprisingly smooth. After having watched 10 launches and recoveries, it looks like it would be kinda rough landing the sub down, but really it's quite smooth. I had been wondering on the way up to the surface what shenanigans everyone was up to, preparing my "initiation." I fully expected to get the standard 15 gallons of ice water dumped on me.

I climbed out of the sub with shaky legs since they had been curled up for eight hours and stumbled down the stairs. I immediately felt water spraying all over me from the hose, so I turned around and let them spray me. Once I was pretty wet, I walked to the crowd and put my arms out deciding to take the cold water that was coming for me. Ken went to dump the water on me, when Pat Hickey, the Expedition Leader, came over and put his hand in the bucket and said, "Is this cold enough?" I actually didn't even notice this happening when it was happening only when I watched it on the tape later. My mind was just racing with excitement at the moment, and I was just not really paying attention.

All of a sudden, I was picked up under the arms, on one side by Dr. Cary and on the other side by Pat. I was carried across the deck and thrown in a garbage can full of ice with a little water. I wouldn't even call it ice water, that's how much ice was in it. And boy was it cold!!! In the trash can of ice and water were my shoes wrapped in tinfoil. I quickly climbed out of the garbage can and dove into the warm pool. I stayed in there for a while quite comfy and warm and then went and took a shower. I was exhausted and hungry and dehydrated and ecstatic. I came back out on deck and watched the second most-amazing sunset I have ever seen in my life. And I've watched a lot of sunsets in my time. It was incredible. Almost everyone on the ship was out watching and taking pictures. Then later, I watched the brilliant stars again and saw some bioluminescence. It was a pretty good day!