![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
60th dive FTW!
Jun. 26th, 2009 02:26 pmI went on another two dives for the lab today! That brings my total up to 61, all cold water. The mission today was to go out on the boat to GPS locations to retrieve moorings with underwater buoys attached (I asked why they couldn't have a longer line so you can see the buoy on the surface but they can't because the water there is too rough - we actually had to skip one location because the waves were too high).
We had two buddy teams and took turns. At the first spot, it was me and the student whose project it is, J. We didn't find it :( The visibility was pretty bad, maybe 10 feet, and we couldn't do a circular search with a line because there was a lot of kelp in the way. At the second spot, the other team found theirs - they attached a line so we could pull the whole thing up into the boat. When we brought it up, it was all covered in a huge variety of algae and critters. I felt bad for the tunicates, they weren't going to survive, but we caught all the little fish, crabs, shrimp etc. and put them back in the water.
Aaaaand remember my recent post about the cutest baby animal?
Well there were three tiny octopuses! We took some pictures quickly and got them back into the water, but not before one of them bit someone with its tiny, tiny beak. J. has promised she'll e-mail us the pictures. There isn't one of me holding an octopus because once one person picked it up, it would cling on for dear life with its suckers and we didn't want to hurt them trying to pull them off. I did pick up the third one to put it in the water - once you stick your hand in the water they let go.
My voice gets all high-pitched when I see something cute. It's a little embarrassing, it's like "we are doing science. Serious business. OMG IT'S AN OCTOPUS!!!"
On the way back we saw some otters, including a mum and baby, and one bashing a shell with a rock on its tummy. It was about 70m away and we could hear the tap-tap-tap.
We had two buddy teams and took turns. At the first spot, it was me and the student whose project it is, J. We didn't find it :( The visibility was pretty bad, maybe 10 feet, and we couldn't do a circular search with a line because there was a lot of kelp in the way. At the second spot, the other team found theirs - they attached a line so we could pull the whole thing up into the boat. When we brought it up, it was all covered in a huge variety of algae and critters. I felt bad for the tunicates, they weren't going to survive, but we caught all the little fish, crabs, shrimp etc. and put them back in the water.
Aaaaand remember my recent post about the cutest baby animal?
Well there were three tiny octopuses! We took some pictures quickly and got them back into the water, but not before one of them bit someone with its tiny, tiny beak. J. has promised she'll e-mail us the pictures. There isn't one of me holding an octopus because once one person picked it up, it would cling on for dear life with its suckers and we didn't want to hurt them trying to pull them off. I did pick up the third one to put it in the water - once you stick your hand in the water they let go.
My voice gets all high-pitched when I see something cute. It's a little embarrassing, it's like "we are doing science. Serious business. OMG IT'S AN OCTOPUS!!!"
On the way back we saw some otters, including a mum and baby, and one bashing a shell with a rock on its tummy. It was about 70m away and we could hear the tap-tap-tap.
