And then before you realize it, the mission is almost over. Tomorrow will be our last day with eight more hours of diving and then we start preparing to return to the surface, a 15 meter journey that will last 17 hours. The fact that all of this might be over, before I realized what was really going on, scared me today for a short moment. You get fairly used to living underwater in a short amount of time. Small things you can't anticipate take on great importance: the smell of over-used dive-suits, the lack of an endless hot shower, the Mexican freeze-dried meals… all become subjects of criticism during various parts of the day. At the same time though, fish pass by the window, snapping shrimps snap, and schoolmasters look curiously into the wet-porch to watch what we're doing. Science gets you in a rush to get things done as fast as possible, but it's worth taking a few moments to take in the big picture. The green moray that looks through the window like a sock-puppet, the fact that fish would benefit from having a neck, the silversides outside the window playing raindrops at night. It's amazing to realize that when you're in your bed, just 30cm above your face (in the top bunk or lying on your side), at the other side of a thick steel plate, you can hear a snapping shrimp trying to impress another pretty snapping crustacean.

Our work goes well as more items disappear from our work list. We expect to finish nearly all of our work tomorrow. That gives us a 3-hour dive on Tuesday as a backup in case something goes not as planned. The biggest nuisance we're currently dealing with are the cold upwellings. Some physical oceanographers who work in this area were slightly amused when we told them last week that we were going to work in Aquarius. "You better dress up," they said. And they were right. Your handwriting slowly turns into Chinese during a dive when the cold water gets to you. With the upwelling, the water clarity also deteriorated, which mostly affected a BBC-camera crew that was filming a story over the last few days. We'll see what tomorrow brings.