Hello from Day Two of the R/V Endeavor’s four-day transit from San Juan, PR to the Blake Escarpment site, our first station of the ADEON II cruise.

I’m Hannah Blair, a Ph.D. student at Stony Brook University studying how we can use active acoustics, or essentially, sonar, to answer questions about fish and zooplankton species and their behavior in the wild. As usual, I’ll be working on the night shift, so I’m spending the traveling time slowly adjusting my sleep schedule to become a fully-functional night dweller.

Setting up our lab in the days before we left the dock went the smoothest it’s ever gone, in my experience. This is the third time I’ve been involved in setting up all the equipment necessary for processing the zooplankton samples we’ll be collecting, and the experience clearly made a difference in the efficiency of set-up.

One of the more interesting occurrences along the transit was passing over the Puerto Rico trench, which contains the deepest point in the Atlantic Ocean. The idea that we were passing over water more than 8,000 meters deep was definitely a thrill!