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...