Unfortunately, we are ending our cruise a few days early due to some inclement weather in the North Atlantic and will return to port on 15 Nov. While we make our way back to port, these next few days will consist of us getting our supplies packed up, playing board games, and sharing cruise photos!

We arrived at our northernmost station, off the coast of Virginia, in the middle of last night, and since there's some bad weather headed our way, the night shift got right to work doing some net tows for sampling. This site is different from the others in that the waters are much richer. We saw some common dolphin off the starboard side chasing some squid and mahi tuna as we were getting ready to deploy the bongo net.

After an exciting morning of tracking down our last lander, which had experienced a run in with some fishing gear, we were happy to find that it was mostly intact. We were even more surprised to learn that several Chain sharks had made a home of out the lander at the ADEON VAC location.

It has been a wonderful trip so far filled with good weather, bad weather, laughs, and a whole lot of hard work. Everyone has seem to fall into a rhythm which makes it not even seem like hard work. We all are sharing our personal tales at sea, struggles with our undergrad degrees, and the search for the next big move in our careers.

These past few days have been jam-packed with science during night shift between the fine-scale acoustic studies, bongo and IKMT net tows, Brandyn Lucca’s target strength science and Cassie Fries’s g-measurements, that y’all learned about during her blog post. So much science!

We are currently in our 11th day of the trip, and we’re running against the clock to do as much as we can before 35-40 kt winds and 11-16 ft seas hit us on Tuesday. Our luck hasn’t been too great today, as some squalls have inserted themselves right into the middle of our lander recovery process, preventing us from contacting the sunken instrument. I know, how rude! We delayed, and after a hearty breakfast we were able to contact the lander and bring it up into the surface world.

I am writing this at midnight, the end of my shift. I am unusual in that instead of having a 6-6 shift, I work noon to midnight, while today’s other blogger works midnight to noon. This means that I am fortunate enough to experience both night and day shift activities! However, I love carrying out hand-on oceanographic work, which means I find it very difficult to go to bed, at the end of a shift, when everyone around me gets to keep going with the exciting work.

Phyllosoma are larval lobsters, but at this stage they resemble almost nothing like the lobsters you eat. With a translucent, thin body, and very long appendages, it’s hard to be able to see how these grow into the lobsters we know and love.

Eight days have flown by aboard the RV Endeavor, and we are almost at the halfway point of this cruise.  Many highlights stand out from the four sites we have been to so far.  The number one highlight was seeing a pilot whale while on marine mammal watch.