Hey all,  this is Lexi blogging from the midnight mauraders shift, as we like to call ourselves. Working from 12-4am means we’re awake and sleeping at strange hours and mischief is bound to occur. Or in all honesty we doze off and send lots of emails.  However today we have reason to be sleepy because we had a very eventful day.  We recovered 1 Jason dive OBS and 3 Popups.  The Jason dive today was particulary eventful based on the biology we saw and the ease with which we found the TRM and send it to the surface.  The sea floor was full of worm like creatues popping out of the bottom, as well as numerous flounder, rock fish, anemonies, shells, sea stars and even a shark.  After finalizing the attachment of the TRM to the elevator we spend 10 minutes exploring the ocean bottom, which was one of our deepest dives of 825 m.  We followed our shark friend around for a while, zoomed in on an enormous red snapper, and plenty of shells.  At the end we decided to grab a rock of about 20 cm.  Atop of it was a big, fatty seastar which refused to leave.  So the rock with the seastar got hauled to the surface by Jason.  I excitedly hauled the seastar around the ship to let everyone take photos with a deep see starfish and touch it, then threw it back into the ocean, here’s hoping it survived.  The rock we’re keeping for further chemical and geologic evaluation.  All in all an interesting and exciting Jason dive, with hopefully more to come!

Cheers,

Lexi from the Atlantis Team