Last day of transit

Today was our last day of transit to the new location. Tomorrow we wake up way too early again and drop the LVWS into the water. It is shallower here, so it should take less time for it to drop and retrieve. We'll see. I still have a day of sewing for the filters tomorrow, a second set has been requested. No problem, I now know exactly what I want to do so the "pattern" is easier. More happy sewing tomorrow. :D


Last night we had a presentation by the PI of the protist group out here. He gave a talk about how harmful algal blooms (HAB) affect fish, sea animals, and humans. An interesting factoid was that in 1961, in LA, a probable HAB infected numerous birds. These infections were neurological and caused the birds to fall to the ground in mass deaths, fling themselves against the sides of houses and basically scare the crap out of a group of local residents. The addendum to the news article from 1961, was that a Hollywood producer by the name of Alfred Hitchcock had called the paper to get the full story. Not too long later, "The Birds" movie was produced. So even Hollywood is inspired by microbiology! :D Tonight's talk was by K-Dude on the meaning of viruses to the environment and how our work has progressed so far. I've seen much of it before, and the group seemed very interested and asked lots of questions.



And another wonderful thing happened today..... We saw land!! After 2 weeks of nothing but water, ocean and more water, land appeared off our port side. An island off of Baja California was visible, rather more close that I thought we would see, but there it was! I ran out on deck to take some pictures as soon as I could. You can see it from this picture of how close we are to land now. And the temperature has dropped. When we were out watching the sunset, a nice sweatshirt would have been appreciated. A few of us are snow bunnies and were happy that it was colder and started talking about how much we were missing the snow and can't wait to get home to see cold weather and snow flakes. Others were saying, no no no, they missed the hot 95F tropical equitorial weather we had just left 4 days ago. Not I, bring on the cold baby!


And we're back to starving the vegetarians out. Strawberry Shortcake and I had limited foods available for dinner as you can see from the menu. I ended up with a few french fries, cauliflower and cottage cheese w/kidney beans. Eh, food is food I guess. The meatatarians out here say the regular foods are fabulous, I'll take their word for it since I'm not interested in lamb, pork, beef, chicken...... And dessert was an oreo cookie cake (I am one of the few people who hate oreo cookies). I can't wait to cook again, and I think Jeboleth is eagerly anticipating my return for a decent meal as well. He tells me he's eating fine, like fried, breaded green beans (um that is no longer a vegetable!) and microwave box meals. :( I feel like I'm not eating much better out here. Luckily there is always fruit, the plums have no flavour, but the green grapes are very tasty.


Okay, time to go clean up and hit the bunk. We have to be on deck at 6:00 am (yes, on deck not just waking up) for the LVWS drop. Luckily the rest of the day I'll be sewing filters together. I'll leave off tonight with a photo taken by my bunkmate, Ms. Ed, during the beautiful sunset off the baja, on the bow of the ship. It was quite beautiful tonight.