Sept. 12, 2005
Jim Cowen

This was a very, very long day. Our UH group worked feverously all day and late into the night to get our equipment ready for deployment tomorrow morning. The attached photos only tell part of the story, since we were too busy to stop and take pictures. We had to prepare three packages: 1) the instrument sled which we finally sent to the seafloor at around 2000 hrs (8 pm); it went down as it’s own elevator. It consisted of the instrument sled itself, “travel” weights (which just help it get to the bottom fast), additional weights (that will be dropped to send the sled back to the surface in a few days), and a giant orange spherical float; 2) the manifold; and 3) separate electrochemical device. The manifold and separate electrochemical device will be carried to the seafloor by the Alvin tomorrow morning.

Our team completely missed dinner, but happily the cooks had saved huge plates of dinner for us which we ate at around 8:30 before going back to the labs and Alvin hanger to finish up our work.