Throughout the day, support divers will come down and transfer back to the surface anything not needed for decompression. Clothing, books, science equipment and dive gear are all included; with the only dive gear the aquanauts need of their own are their mask and fins. A 15 cuft "bail out" bottle is given to them at the end of decompression for the ascent dive from AQUARIUS to the support vessel that takes them back ashore.

Decompression is a slow "ride" back to one atmosphere inside AQUARIUS, while the outside remains at 2.5 ata's. It takes roughly 16 ½ hours to make this ascent to the surface.

An oxygen tender joins us in AQUARIUS and runs the deco station, controlling the ascent rate for the first 70 mins while the saturated divers breathe O2 for three 20 minute periods. During the O2 period we travel at a rate of 1 foot every 6 minutes, and after that we slow down to 1 foot per 22 minutes, eventually as slow as 1 foot per 34 minutes by the time we reach 0 FSW.

Movies, card games, internet, and conversation will fill the next evening and early morning hours, as well as getting caught up on sleep. This is when the science divers reflect on their entire mission, what they did right and what they would do different if they just had "ONE MORE DAY"! After doing this type of work for the last 10 years, I've heard every "sat" team say the same thing, "Could we get one more day"? Believe me, they are much happier to get to the surface and back to land than any of the techs, and we do this 2 and 3 times a year. No one will deny that 10 days living and working in this environment takes its toll on the body. Living in your wet suit for 6-9 hours a day leaves the skin a bit sore, and your ears and feet seem to take the a fair amount of abuse.

Beside all those small irritations, this mission went very well. Mark, Jo, Beth and Janet are all pleased with the progress they made. Somewhere around 125 profiles and I'm not sure what the count is on the chambers.

Byron and I got a lot done on the habitat over the last nine days also. We've made up a list of items that will be tended to during the next three months, what we call winter maintenance. December, January, and February are our non-mission months where we get the major portion of our underwater work done, and the support equipment organized, cleaned, painted, and set back out on the reef for the start of the new mission year in March. AQUARIUS has a full season scheduled in 2003 with possible missions involving the Navy, NASA, and NOAA's Ocean Exploration.