Lazy surveying

Well, after more than 12 hours of trying to communicate with that Lamont OBS, we gave up. We tried just about everything, but we never really heard from it. So, another $70,000 gift to the sea floor. At this point, we won't even reach a 2/3 data return. I was told that 2/3 is typical, but I guess I didn't really believe it and I just had high hopes. But we went ahead and undershot that statistic with this experiment! It's rough when it's so out of your control.

Right now we are taking a break from attempted recovery (we have attempted with all 16 now though) and are doing a 20 hour survey. We are basically just cruising around recording bathymetry, gravity anomalies, and magnetic anomalies on the sea floor. It's a nice break from the anxiety of recovery. I can veg out during my shift (aka write this blog, check email, watch a movie), rather than be down in the labs trying to listen for pings. But, at 3:30 am we should be back at the previous Lamont site where we weren't able to establish communication to give it one more shot. I have little faith, but we should do everything we can.

Otherwise, there's not much more to report. Other than food! This morning I had a fabulous macadamia nut pancake (pretty sure it was whole wheat too), lunch I skipped but it was sloppy joes and cajun catfish. Dinner was quite fancy, bacon wrapped chicken breasts, cheese ravioli with tomato caper sauce (they really seem to like their capers on this ship), scalloped dill potatoes, and zuchinni. It was one of the other grad student's birthday yesterday, so the kitchen made him a cake and we sang as he came downstairs tonight. I'm holding out for ice cream later, but I heard the frosting was really good. There were fresh baked chocolate chip cookies sitting out today too, they are like hockey pucks, they look so good.

I spent the rest of the day watching movies in the lounge and not doing much of anything. Don has the data from all the Scripps instruments, and in the correct format now, so we should be able to start looking at data quality tomorrow! Hopefully this won't also be a disappointment.