Another day, another dollar....not really.

I haven't blogged the last two days because they've sucked. And I've been in an accordingly sucky mood. We had two incidences where the DIDSON did not record; one was my fault and another was due to unknown circumstances. I have, of course, been beating myself up over it and sulking. Everyone keeps saying "it's ok to make mistakes" but there is definitely a lot of pressure. Note to self: if you ever start to feel like you have a good grip on what's going on....you don't. Otherwise, things seem to be going ok for everyone else, and we appear to be back on track for getting the number of sites we need inside and outside the research closure area. I'm on the home stretch...5 days until I'm home. I'll get some boat time this afternoon and be able to get the hell out of the lab, so a little sunshine will do me some good.

Wait for it....productivity!

Behold! We've collected our first data. It was crappy data, but it was data. Getting the DIDSON to 1. work and 2. download it's memory (albeit very, very slowly) is the vast majority of the battle and one I always seem to lose. But, it went off without a hitch. The data we got was pretty fuzzy and had a ton of background noise; we're waiting to pull the camera up from today's deployment momentarily so we'll see how the adjustments we made changed anything. Hopefully the logistical nightmares have ceased so that we can deploy twice a day. I still feel like I have NO idea what's going on, I'm hoping to shake this feeling sometime before the end of my time on this ship (which is thankfully in 6 days. I'm not a fan of ship life). Actually, I'm hoping to shake this feeling sometime before the end of grad school. I constantly go back and forth between being extremely confident (hey, I can explain my research in a coherent manner!) to being convinced they're going to kick me out at any moment (hey...everyone here is WAY smarter than I am...). Peter keeps telling me to "take notes" for when I'm chief scientist...HAH. For now, I'm just going through the motions of assembling, disassembling, charging, downloading, etc. Today was pretty boring...it's a lot of "hurry up and wait." I rush to get everything prepped and ready to go....and then have nothing to do once the divers get it on the boat. This should get better as time progresses and I have more data to pick through, but that also means I'll see the light of day less (I've been outside twice in the last four days). Anyways, off to recover the camera and begin the long process of downloading.

Fair winds and following seas

Greetings from the Nancy Foster! As always, I've promised to blog this trip. As always, I'll probably lose steam within a few days (I'm already exhausted... only two weeks left.........). After the general confusion and chaos that ensues with a lot of really exhausted people who are responsible for a lot of really expensive equipment, we've begun trying to figure out (and test) when it would be appropriate to deploy the DIDSON, and how. For now, it seems like we're going to do a morning diver deployment, let it collect data for 3-4 hours, and then pick it up with the J-frame of the ship around noon. This process gets repeated again in the afternoon, so that we record through sunset. We want to get a comparison between predation rates at periods of low activity (daytime) to periods of high activity (twilight periods). Things are running oddly smoothly. Readers (probably just my dad) should understand that things NEVER run smoothly with this camera. There is always some sort of housing leak, battery malfunction, data malfunction, etc. But, I'll be cautiously optimistic and say that we're on track, and better yet, our timing seems to mesh reasonably well with the 50,000 (exaggeration) other projects going on.

These trips are always a little anxiety inducing for me. I get very anxious that I have no idea what's going on the first few days...and then I get very anxious that nobody else does, either. I constantly re-read a paper Peter sent me on "the importance of feeling stupid in science". All things considered, though, I love what I do and can explain it thoroughly, so I'm father along than most grad students...