Here come the... clouds :(

So far, we have been blessed with wonderful weather. Each day has been sunny with bright blue waters below us. Yesterday, Jennifer and I spent a lot of time at the bow of the boat watching the waves and the rainbows. We saw several flying fish jump out of the water and skim over the surface for a few meters until they gracefully popped back into the drink. Once, while we were watching a flying fish, a bird (probably a booby) swooped in and caught the flying fish mid-flight. The booby plunged into the water and soon bobbed back up and we watched it swallow the fish whole. A few minutes later we saw another flying fish and the booby attacked again, but it was too slow. The fish got away. It was just like watching Animal Planet!

Alas, the sunny days could not last forever. This morning we woke up for the cast-off at 4 a.m. only to realize that the water was too rough for us to deploy the rosette. We waited for an hour, but in the end, our early rise was for nothing. I didn’t waste any time in getting back to sleep. By noon, the weather had calmed down a little bit so we tried to take samples again. We lowered the rosette into the water but as it was going down to depth, the weather took a turn for the worse. It was going to be miserable trying to get it back onto the boat. The wind was howling and the sky sent down pounding rain. The ocean swells were up to 25 feet by the time the rosette resurfaced! Luckily, we got the thousand pound piece of machinery back on deck without any mishaps. I spent the rest of the day filtering the samples and recording the data. Fun!

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