Day 6, 7:52 PM EST

Finally made it to the island! I actually came over on the small boat yesterday afternoon. Yesterday morning was my sub dive. I rode in the back chamber with one of the sub pilots. The sub has two compartments: a large plexiglass bubble on the front, and a metal chamber with porthole windows behind the bubble. A sub pilot and a scientist ride in each compartment and we have headsets so that we can communicate with each other. The mission of my dive was to collect pvc poles with samples in them that were deployed on the seafloor 12 years ago. We visited three sites: 900 feet, 240 feet, and 100 feet. Because it takes the sub a really long time to rise, we went to the 900 ft site first and worked our way up. Our sampling transect (the line along which we have deployed our samples) runs along a steep wall that starts with a coral reef and ends up at depth where the wall is less steep and there are huge sand dunes. At 900 ft we were investigating the sand dunes. There isn’t much coral down that deep, but the sand dunes have crinoids growing on them. Crinoids have been around for millions of years, although today they are only successful down deep. They are able to survive where there is not much light (it is pretty dark down at 900 ft). They look like flowers on stalks, but they are actually animals that eat by waving their arms in the water and filtering out tiny plants and animals. Our deep poles actually had several crinoids growing on them! We were able to bring them up and take pictures! Unfortunately, bringing organisms up from deep water usually kills them, so we will preserve the crinoids and use them for teaching students. The 240 site is right on the steepest part of the wall and is solid coral reef. Our poles are perched on a very narrow ledge and had been overgrown by all kinds of reef organisms: corals, sponges, brittle stars, etc. By the time we worked our way up to 100 feet, the reef has much more light and is mostly corals and sponges. The wall is not very steep and the poles sit in the middle of a big flat sand patch. We had trouble finding the site at first because the visibility is not as good in the winter, but eventually I spotted them from the back of the sub. While we were picking up the pole, we were surprised to find a second pole almost completely buried. Our team has assumed that it had been carried away by a hurricane, but there it was! We collected it and the team was very excited to have more data! After almost three hours of exploring the bottom, it was time to come back to the surface! It was a successful dive…we collected all of our arrays! My fellow scientist Sally said our sub dive was “awesome, just awesome! The photic zone never looked better!”