Living on a floating vessel means the ground is always shifting with the waves and what was once unmoving on land is now continuously trying to throw you off balance, especially in bad weather. What used to be some of the easiest tasks, like walking in a straight line, getting dressed or enjoying a hot cup of tea, now has a new level of complexity.

Rough seas greeted us overnight before our first full day at sea. Aboard the RV Armstrong, the science team weathered the storm and by mid-morning, the seas had abated enough for a Conductivity, Temperature, and Density (CTD) cast along with the recovery and redeployment of the first ADEON bottom lander.

Work aboard the R/V Armstrong during an ADEON sea trial continues 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, but for individual researchers (with the exception of the Chief Scientist, who is always on call), 12 of those hours are free time. A part of this free time is, of course, spent sleeping, but are ADEON researchers doomed to suffer boredom for the rest of the day? Absolutely not!

The R/V Armstrong and her crew are no less than what I remember them to be from my last experience onboard two years ago for the first ADEON cruise: professional, timely, respectful, and wonderful. I am excited to be back for ADEON 4.0.

We left the dock early yesterday morning and have been trekking steadily southward towards our first station off the coast of Virginia all day and into the night. A storm system sitting just offshore of the eastern US is trying to throw a wrench into our plans, kicking waves up into 10 ft swells or more in some areas – not so fun conditions for getting our science done!

The ADEON Cruise 4 Science Crew includes Chief Scientist Dr. Joe Warren, 3 Research Scientists, 1 Artist, 9 graduate/undergraduate students, and me (Jennifer Miksis-Olds, Lead Principal Investigator of the ADEON project). This is our 4th project cruise out of 5.

And we are off to sea! The RV Armstrong left the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution dock this morning at 8:30am EST and we have begun our transit to our first science station down off the Virginia coast. This is the fourth cruise on the ADEON (Atlantic Deepwater Ecosystem Observatory Network) project. We have 7 sites along the continental shelf-break (where the water depth goes from ~ 200 m to 4000 m) from Virginia down to Florida where we have bottom landers that are sampling the environment and soundscapes continuously over the past year.