Hello Land Dwellers!  We’re down to the last week of our cruise, so we’re closing in on the last few stations for the ADEON project and about to start the JASON group’s portion of the cruise.  The ship should be in deep (2000+ m) water for their engineering dives which means we (the night watch) may have the chance to do some deep sea net tows.

In the musical, Fiddler on the Roof, this song is performed at the wedding of Tevye and Golde's eldest daughter. The parents are amazed at how quickly the years have passed and are reminded at how full all those years were with events both happy and sad.  As we sail and work on the final ADEON cruises, like Tevye and Golde, I marvel at how quickly these last 4+ years of research cruises have passed. Many events, small and large, bringing joy and satisfaction each cruise – the successful lander release and retrieval, watching and participating in extremely interesting work by non-ADEON cruise participants, warm, sunny days on the deck in the middle of the Gulf Stream, and, importantly, new friendships begun.

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.