who the hell is vacuuming at 4:30 in the morning?!?! Ok, so it is not a vacuum, but it sure sounds like it, probably the thrusters. or why I am up at 4:30am? (just finished sampling), or why did I just eat a Montreal smoked meat sandwich at 4:30am? (being outside on a ship somehow makes you hungry), or Am I going to wake up at 7:00am to eat breakfast (yes!), Am I going to go back to sleep after breakfast (probably), Should I work out in the morning (yes), will I work out (we'll see.....)

anyway, enough of this random babble, just finished our first trace metal sampling, pumping at 5, 10, 25, and 40m, all went well, Keith Johnson (from IOS, running the trace metal show here) is great to work with, we started a half hour late and still finished a half hour early, so thats good.

Its crazy the sense of scale often in oceanography. The maximum depth we pumped at was 40m (~120ft), which would often be considered exceedingly shallow in terms of oceanographic sampling, and yet that is like a 10-12 story building. As we prepared to pull up 15m of pump tubing between 40 and 25m, I thought, 15m, yeah, thats nothing, but it turns out pulling up 45ft of tubing up out of the ocean definately took longer than I expected.

anyway, better go to bed before breakfast

oh, yeah, it was a perfectly clear night, went out on the aft deck to just enjoy the stars (sooooo many stars without the influence of city lights), and saw 3 shooting stars!