Howdy! My name is Brandyn Lucca, and I am a graduate student at Stony Brook University. This will be my fifth ADEON cruise, and third aboard the R/V Neil Armstrong, studying how underwater sound bounces and scatters off of individual critters in the ocean. This involves everything from running experiments aboard the boat, measuring the acoustic signature of animals in an aquarium, to simply taking photos of each specimen we catch to collect information on body length and shape.

Today was a very happy day aboard the RV Armstrong, preceded by a very sad and disappointing one the day before. Yesterday, our first task of the day was to recover the bottom lander that was deployed about a year ago at the WIL site off the coast of NC. This lander sat on the bottom of the ocean collecting acoustic and oceanographic data for over a year. The lander is equipped with 2 releases for redundancy to ensure that if one malfunctions and does not release the weights, the second release code can be sent for the backup release to disengage and allow the lander to rise to the surface. Alas, none of the release codes brought the lander to the surface yesterday after both confirming that they had in fact been released.

Last night we conducted our first zooplankton net tows of the trip, just off Cape Hatteras. I still get excited by the prospect of what organisms we might catch. Looking over the sides of the ship as we sent out the nets this time, I could already guess one thing we’d be pulling in: sargassum (a type of seaweed).  Sargassum is a macroalgae extremely common to this region of the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, this seaweed was named after it – the Sargasso Sea sits at the center of a circulating current system that forms the North Atlantic Gyre.

Hello AR49 ADEON cruise blog readers. My name is Grant, and I’m a second-year PhD student under Dr. Jennifer Miksis-Olds who graciously invited me along on the final cruise of the ADEON project. As a new guy on the ship (the only new guy actually), I’ve spent the start of this voyage adapting to life on the ship. Luckily, I managed to dodge the horrors of seasickness, which the crew and other scientists were sure to warn me about, especially given our flirtation with the nasty nor’Easter cruising up the coast.

Hello everyone! I’m Carmen Lawrence, a project scientist with JASCO Applied Sciences. My role as part of the science team is facilitating the deployment and recovery of the landers and ensuring the sensors on board are installed and functioning properly. This is my fifth ADEON cruise – I’ve been on all of them!

Dec 06 – Sailing Southward

So we’re traveling south to our first lander site off the coast of North Carolina and have a fairly long steam ahead of us.  Thankfully, we’ve managed to let the big nor’Easter pass through us, but we’ve still got some lumpy seas (much like mashed potatoes, lumps in the seas are not ideal) ahead.

Today we set sail on the R/V Neil Armstrong for its 49th science cruise. ADEON is accompanied this year by the Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) Jason team. There has been a nasty storm on the NE Coast, and by delaying a day we will hopefully miss the full force of the storm.  It will be a very bumpy ride for the first 12 hours until we emerge to the south of the storm.  Send thoughts of strength and calm stomachs to our soon to be seasick science crew.

After an alert from JASCO about the newly surfaced lander, ADEON’s team worked throughout the long holiday weekend with Kerry Strom, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (https://www.whoi.edu/)  and Melissa Brennan of the M/V Alucia, (OceanX fleet (http://www.oceanx.org/) to orchestrate a rescue effort. On December 1, in concert with JASCO who provided coordinate feeds for the drifting lander, Captain Nick Inglis and the Alucia crew (http://www.oceanx.org/ship/) worked into the night to find the lander.  Near midnight one of the crew [who deserves the name Owl-Eyes] spotted the lander bobbing [without a working beacon light] in the dark waters of the Atlantic. The Alucia crew, OceanX, WHOI, JASCO, and all those involved that willingly worked together on this recovery, demonstrated a true community partnership and a dedication to rise above the call of duty in the advancement of ocean science.   Not only did this group’s actions facilitate the recovery of a valuable ocean observation asset, it also returned over a year of data in a three-year dataset, which by contract will be made available to the public in support of present and future science.

At the beginning of the cruise, in our first orientation and safety briefing, Captain Derek outlined the ship’s rules –one of which was No Crying. We failed here, as there were many tears born of laughter and humor, and all will be going home with good memories. Thanks go to each of the ships crew and our science team. Many graduate students were drafted by their advisors to take part in this journey, but there were many others that volunteered their time. Science at sea is a team effort, and everyone helped to make this a successful cruise. We had a first for ADEON on this cruise, thanks to our onboard artist Wendy Klemperer. Last afternoon, we had an art show that lined the walls outside the galley and down to the main lab. Wendy shared her works that included portraits of both the science and ship crew, biology caught in our nets, and many of the ship and science hardware.

So we’ve thrown the dock lines and have secured the R/V Armstrong back to the dock at WHOI. After living in very close quarters, eating meals together, telling and hearing stories, and all the other aspects that make ship-board life a unique experience, we are saying our goodbyes and the science crew is traveling back to their lives on land. We had a very good cruise and continued our streak of collecting wayward vessels aboard the Armstrong (we’re now up to 3: an autonomous sailboat in 2017 and a dinghy and glider on this trip). On behalf of the ADEON team, thanks to the Captain and crew of the RV Armstrong for a great trip. We had good weather and were able to complete nearly everything we had planned to do.