We are still transiting to our northern, more hypoxic station, so we have a little down time. We will be stopping in Solomon’s MD at the Chesapeake Biological Lab shortly to pick up one of our principal investigators for the last half of the cruise, but in the meantime I had a delicious lunch and took some pictures. I point this out only for the irony of it, but I found an iPhone app made my Microsoft (!) that helps you create panorama photos that can be manipulated using the Microsoft Silverlight plugin on your browser. I’ve gone ahead and linked to two of them below because wordpress.com does not allow embedding of these types of objects.

The first is of the stern of the ship, where we do our work. In it you can see some of the equipment we use including the MOCNESS, Tucker Trawls, and Scanfish, not to mention quite a lot of the ship’s winches, A-frame and ‘dog house’ where the engineers operate the winches and cranes. The second one is the view from the “science” chair on the bridge. It’s a great view up there and I tend to wander up and watch the world go by during the little down time I have out here. It’s a nice chance to chat with the crew too, who have become real friends after all the time we spend out here.

Enjoy these, because tomorrow is going to be a busy day and I’m not sure what I’ll be able to write. In the coming months I hope to keep up with this blog on a weekly basis on shore and more frequently on cruises. We’ll have students and teachers working with us over the summer, and so hopefully I can get some guest blog posts in addition to my ramblings. ‘Til then, enjoy the panoramas!

Rear deck panorama.

Bridge panorama.