Today's first dive was one of those for my long-term RAM, not just a flash memory file. This was a dive not to be forgotten anytime soon. First, how many of you have ever had a single dive lasted for 5 hrs? This one for us started at 5:45 so that we could swim down to our research sites before dawn, position ourselves with small flashlights covered with red cellophane, and hover over plants just about ready to release cells to swim away in thin wispy streams. It 's hard to get the images fully across to someone who might not have had this chance. The water is so inky black that you can see the moon out overhead, through 55 ft of water. You can see a few critters with a blue-white glow. The rest looks like a cool black darkness that slowly warms with break of day. By 6:30, our plants were spewing swimming cells in a way that few have ever seen before. Clare and I brought samples of these swimming cells back to the wet porch and set up some genetic crosses for the next hour.

By 8 am Clare and I were back at the 55 ft site to begin early morning fluorescence scans of plants from a suspected high-nutrient site. These measurements are some of the first to use fluorescence as a sensitive measure of photosynthesis. In this case, we want to use this approach to see if plants at a site of occasional upwelling have a greater photosynthetic capacity than those under some level of nutrient limitation. Our dive finally ended back at the Aquarius in time for a CNN crew to come for a visit.

By 12:30, I could not keep my eyes open. Thankfully this "storage interval" is long enough to eat enough calories for three landlubber meals, sleep for an hour and still have some time to get organized for the next dive.

By 3 pm, Clare and I were commuting back to put up shade "sunbrellas," affectionately labeled Vroom Boxes, after Peter who designed the frame with the least amount of PVC required. These plants will be measured every two days to see if they grow more slowly than the plants marked as the controls (the plants in the natural environment). This 3 hr dive seemed to just run through time. Being free from worrying about bottom time should make the dives seem longer. Yet, paradoxically, these long dives seem to be even shorter than the short dives. Another lesson for life? Or at least something else for my long-term RAM.