As day six comes to a close I find myself wondering where the time has gone. Although this is only my second saturation with Aquarius, I feel right at home. My first saturation was in May of this year lasting four days. Its purpose was to train habitat technicians for upcoming missions later in the year. Habitat technicians like myself rotate missions during the year. When we are not in saturation, we are working on the surface helping to maintain things here.

As I am writing this I am reminded that it's men like Jim Buckley, Jay Styron, Mike Florant, Mark Hulsbeck, Tim Gallagher, Thor Dunmire, Russell Lounsbury, Fred Young, and Glenn Taylor who help us greatly along the way. Keeping a close eye on us while working long hours for days on end. They are always ready to assist us in every way possible, and they have my deepest respect.

Craig Cooper, (the senior habitat technician for this mission), and I have been busy keeping things in order here. Craig (or Coop, as we call him) is a life-long veteran saturation diver, and has worked in and around deep sites all over the globe. So he makes it easy on me when it comes to learning the ropes down here. It is our responsibility to maintain life support systems, schedule dives, and maintain proper diving logs. Dives are actually called excursions here. We follow a dive table much like surface diving, only modified. If we are saturated at 50 feet, then that becomes our "surface" from which to work. If we stay outside the habitat at 50 feet (or storage depth) we have an unlimited amount of time to work without worrying about decompressing. If we go below storage however, then air saturation dive tables apply. As an example, a diver saturated at 50 feet can dive to 110 feet for 210 minutes. (Instead of 20 minutes using Navy tables.) As you can see, this allows researchers to spend much more time at a site collecting samples, and measurements.

I've managed to accompany Roy Caldwell on two of his collection dives. Donning my own set of Aquanaut gear we set out for the deep sites. The first visit was towards the Northeast Gazebo. It sits at 50 feet, and 300 yards away from the habitat. Inside it is equipped with communication back to Aquarius, and an air fill station. From there we set off on a line that stretches into the ever-blue ocean. We passed over countless coral ledges, and found ourselves in an open sand patch at 110 feet below the surface. Once there I attached my dive reel to the excursion line that we were following, and our search began for the ever-elusive stomatopod. We looked for about an hour, then returned to the gazebo to fill our tanks. We set off for the same site a second time searching as before. Another hour went by and we had not found a single one.

I spent the next few days diving off the hooka rig attached to the habitat. Cleaning valves and checking out the area around me. I was flocked by fish as I scraped off shells with my wire brush; all wanting to attack the little edible munches that floated by. Large tarpon, permit, and bar jacks also passed by me to investigate my actions.

Today I went again on an excursion with Roy to another deep site here that we call S-4. It lies 200 yards away from the habitat to the Southeast, at 110 feet deep. Our luck for the stomatopod finally changed as we bagged six within an hour. Happy with our findings we headed back for the habitat.

My only regret is that the visibility of the water is poor, and has been for the entire week. Usually that is not the case, so I feel like a passenger stuck on an airplane in a foggy airport. Otherwise it's been great and I'm already looking forward to my next mission as a habitat tech.

Michael "Hutch" Hutchens