Monday, July 19

Greg and I get up for a morning dive at 7:30 a.m. since this will be the last opportunity we will have to spend quality time around the habitat. We have until 10 a.m. when we are required to come in for good, prepare the remainder of our gear for potting to the surface, after which we will begin decompression at 4 in the afternoon. While Greg and I head off to take pictures of some of the coral mounds in an area just off the coral sand and rubble field right around the habitat, Mineo and Satoshi use the morning for one of their few leisure dives now that they have completed their experiments. Satoshi is especially keen to take pictures of every variety of coral he can find and this morning he finds a new one.

We had expected to find a grouper as an everyday companion during our week long adventure but it isn’t until today, the last day, that one makes an appearance. Greg follows it all around the habitat to make sure he makes our video archive.

Jay and Cliff have been working with the rest of Aquarius staff topside over the past few days, preparing for this final day by sending up excess gear, clothes, scientific instruments and the like up in pressure containers as they become available. New faces appear hourly in the portholes as they swim toward the wet porch and transport the waiting pots to the surface for return to home base. As the pace quickens, we get the second and final house call from the good Dr. Kruse. He has a check list with him and begins by asking each of us how we are feeling. I had some early problems with a headache but it has now disappeared. The only other malady besides a few cuts and bruises from encounters with the reef is Greg’s ear pain, not alarming by any measure, but sometimes painful if he touches near the ear drum. Dr. Kruse uses the onboard ear examination kit and sees nothing out of the ordinary, pronouncing him fit to undergo decompression with the rest of us. Each bunk now has an oxygen mask which we will breathe from for the first hour of our decompression in 3 fifteen minute sessions with 5 minutes rest in between. The idea, as I understand it, is to speed up the offgassing of nitrogen with the pure oxygen. Past experience, the staff tells us, demonstrates that these oxygen breathing intervals result in less fatigued Aquanauts after decompression. The rest of the 16 hours 20 minutes we spend in Aquarius will be waiting while the pressure we are living in slowly returns to Key Largo normal – one atmosphere. Doug Kesling, training and Safety Coordinator for the NOAA National Undersea Research Center at UNC Wilmington has now joined us as well and he will monitor our transition back to the world we left behind.

Decompression countdown began at 4 p.m. Jay, Cliff, Greg, Satoshi, Mineo, and I filed to our respective bunks where the oxygen masks were waiting, and we listened for Doug to give the command to begin our first 20 minute dose of pure oxygen. With the mask clamped on my face, I suddenly thought, where are the bubbles? I had just spent the last 6 days with an average of 6 hours in the water everyday breathing with a mask that was bathed in bubbles: it was second nature to think a mask meant bubbles. By the time we finished our oxygen intervals, we had risen 1 foot every 6 minutes to an ambient depth of 33 feet. It would take the next 14 hours before we reached our destination of one atmosphere.