Day 5:

Today was actually pretty rough. The water temperature dropped ½ of 1 degree centigrade, and it made a surprising difference. Things are coming together pretty well, and we have extended our bottom times an hour or two. Up until today, we were spending 4 to 5 hours out on the reef, because the dive teams needed support from people in the habitat. Now, we have too much to do on the reef so all of us are spending 6 hours in the water.

After 2 hours in the morning, I realized that this was not going to be easy. By two and a half hours, I was counting the number of hours left until the mission was over. We went in and I pulled on all the polar fleece I brought with me and crawled under my blanket to get warm again. Fortunately, it wasn't just me. Everyone said that it was colder today. Had some lunch, and started to feel better, but was not excited to get back in the water.

Surprisingly, however, the afternoon dive was not bad at all. We changed our plan and decided to only spend 2 hours, but we were getting lots of work done with our newly arrived brass pieces. Since we weren't feeling all that cold, we decided to go back to our original 3 hour plan.

The brass experiments involve taking our models out to the reef in Tupperware containers of ice water. The brass pieces have thermometers inserted inside them. Once out on the reef, we set the models up next to a flow probe, turn on the data-logger, and pull off the ice water cover. Immediately, the models are surrounded by warmer seawater, and we measure the time it takes for them to warm up. We spend a lot of time sitting absolutely still during these experiments, so it is good that we have to swim back and forth to the habitat to warm up. These are the sort of experiments where it is incredible to have the resources of the habitat available. There are certainly other ways to run experiments such as these, but by far the easiest is to have a 30 second swim back to a dry room where our helpful habitat techs have prepared the next sample and have it ready to go. We are able to turn out an incredible number of experimental runs in a short time.

In the end, it was another great and productive day. We are all getting a bit waterlogged, but excited by the amount of work we are getting done.