We all live in a yellow submarine...

First full day with the fine Marine Sanctuary/NOAA/UNCW folks preparing for the Aquarius mission. More on that later. For now, because of the insane winds, the DIDSON team has been shore-bound and extremely unproductive. The general question has been, "what should I be doing?" and the general answer has been, "I have no idea." The result is a lot of Cuban food, dark and stormys, and visits to West Marine. The house I'm staying in reminds me a lot of the Twilight Zone-- there are a lot of dead bugs, it seems like nobody's been there for years but there's a thriving invert tank, there is a rack of mysterious vials in the freezer, and a clock outside that's always wrong. There are also very creepy insect posters above my bed. However, everyone here (who all inconveniently have some variation of the same name, it seems) is extremely nice.

Now, for the science.
First: DIDSON. The hope has been to deploy the DIDSON in full autonomous mode on various points along the reef and use this data in conjunction with the SIMRAD transducer on the boat. Because we can't use the boats due to high winds, our plan B for now is to just plunk the DIDSON down in continuous mode (with a shore-based power supply) in a mangrove channel and cross our fingers. God willing, the camera will connect to the network, and ideally the battery housing won't leak. Maybe. We'll be deploying it tonight around dusk to see if we can watch juvenile snappers, etc, migrate out of the safety of the channel to feed. All of the cool autonomous stuff, which I happen to need for my thesis, will most likely be done after I leave.

Second: Aquarius. Aquarius is a big freaking deal. At our briefing this morning, I learned that, between live webcasts and tweeting (twittering? twits?) to schools, local media coverage, and national media coverage (think CNN, NBC, etc), the Aquarius mission and outreach project at www.oceanslive.org will reach between 50-60 million people. It's essentially like going to space, and the aquanauts (yes, that is a technical term), train heavily and over two years of prep goes into each mission. It's really quite cool to be a part of something so big (over 30 people are involved in the production and science aspects), and I'll be contributing DIDSON sonar footage to one of the many documentary-type episodes they will be shooting this week. I may even get to appear in one of the episodes, we'll see.