Tuesday, May 17

Today leg 2 got on the van at 4:30 am to make it to Pensacola in time for changing with leg 1. Once the Weatherbird II arrived we got to see the people from leg 1, who offered us a lot of tips from their experiences; the most important one being that we should not TRIP ON THE BOLT! We will try our best to keep that in mind, but no promises on how well that will go. Once we said our goodbyes to leg 1, we got some training into what to do when the alarm goes off and general rules on the ship. We also walked around the ship and watched some dolphins surf at the bow. Just like Lexi and Kattey told us from leg 1, thanks for the tip guys!

We then proceeded to have a science meeting where we went over what our schedules look like. Today the people who are in charge of the fishing are working on tying hooks and have to be prepared to wake up at 6 am tomorrow. While the people in charge of the coring and CTDs have to be ready at 11 pm until breakfast tomorrow. I am working on the CTDs and got a run-through of the huge computer that is talking to our CTD machine that controls when the bottles open at different depths and records important values like the temperature, salinity, pH, etc. I am extremely excited to deploy this tonight at our first location, especially since this will be the first time I will be deploying it. Fingers crossed that it goes well!

Also, happy constitution day to my home country, Norway!

-Silje van Mierlo.