Never mind my last post, last night/this morning has been pretty exciting for fishing. Last night I finally caught something (squid...I was going to save one in the freezer for one in the name of science for one of the fish people, but didn't have the heart and threw it back after I had bagged it). Also, last night, Kelly caught a puffer fish, which was apparently incredibly unlikely since we are in deep waters far off shore. And just a bit ago the chief caught a Wahoo...It is huge! It was as tall as me... seriously, someone took a picture of one of the crew members holding it up by the tail with Carly and I standing next to it. Cool! But apparently it will be dinner...

So...my recent lack of posting has gotten at least my mommy concerned, so I figured I'd check in, just in case any one else is also checking in :) Tonight marks the end of cycle four, which means we have just one cycle left and less than two weeks until I am home! The seas have gotten a tiny bit rougher but not too bad, and we are pretty far into our day to day schedule, so there isn't too much new to tell you! Still just tons of filtering, then returning the water back to the ocean with a little less stuff. We are still running two sets of incubation experiments, so one a day. At least tomorrow night I should get to sleep!

So... tonight we actually got a 'night off' from the 2:00 am cast, but of course, I drew the short straw and had to get up at 3:00 am to run the chlorophyll data from last 2:00 am cast. There are two other scientists up right now (everyone else certainly has the good sense to be sleeping) and i can't possibly explain to anyone who doesn't know either why either would still be up. Both super quirky, but great. Anyways, the samples get about an hour to thaw, so here I am. I'm kinda bummed right now because for some reason mu shuffle is evading me, but other than that, all is well. I've been lazy the past day or two, I really want to go for a run, but unfortunately that is not entirely an option at this point, or at least not really a reasonable one. But other than recent laziness I have been biking a bit, stationary of course, and hopefully some day I will be able to keep up with my dad, though it is incredibly unlikely! Certainly my number one goal of the cruise! :)

In all of the turtle excitement yesterday, I forgot to mention that yesterday was actually the 42 birthday of the R/V Melville. Aside from being the oldest running ship in the national oceanographic university system, and being the ship on which King Kong was filmed, I have a few other fun facts that I hope you will enjoy. The Melville has traveled 1,260,000 miles using 30,660,000 gallons of fuel! The Melville has also served over 7500 scientists and over 1,839,50 meals, not to mention approximately 14 fish have been caught. Just kidding about the fish...they lost count of the real number ages ago, we've had a night or two with way more than 14.

TURTLE!!!!!!!!!!!!

So I finally saw a sea turtle, and if you can't tell, I'm super excited about it! I mean, it was pretty lame, you could see the shell and every once in a while it would poke its head up or flap one of its flippers in the air, but still, it was awesome!.

Went in the hot tub tonight around sunset and it was pretty much fantastic! So, the hot tub on the deck? Yeah the chief engineer is awesome and decided instead of pumping the hot sea water surrounding the on-board engines directly back into the ocean, he would re-route it and make a spa. He also lies and shoots potato guns, but that a whole other set of stories! We have moved on to cycle three, which should begin momentarily. Our incubation experiment, which we take samples from every other day look like they should have some really interesting results. I seem to be having trouble formulating cohesive and useful thoughts at the moment, but here: http://www.bigelow.org/index.php?cID=71 ... its the link to Bigelows' blurb on our cruise, far more eloquent at this point in time...

I definitely forgot one...
4. Eat when you can, sleep when you can!

Anyway, we are about to have our usual Wednesday drill where we learn about shipboard safety and practice getting our life-vests and such. Other than that work is as usual...well I guess not...our filter rack went a bit haywire this morning making some of our early morning tasks a bit of a pain. In the past few days we have started cycle 2, which is just a few days...(next comes cycle 3...) and with this new cycle we have started two sets of incubation experiments which look like they should be really cool, though they have certainly added to what had already appeared to be a mildly insurmountable amount of work! These two new experiments focus on enriching water with either silicates or trace metals, and also use varying amount of light to understand population growth...(I know I probably just lost 3/4 of your attention, especially Laura who is I am sure, making infinite amounts of fun of me for being on a 'science' cruise!) And thanks to Judy (or whoever sees mom and dad first) for helping them which their blogging troubles...