We spent the week getting ready to take a group of students and professors out. We finished up all the projects we had been working on. We got the CTD prepped on Thursday. Then did a wet test on friday. It was my first time deploying the CTD. It went pretty smoothly, and was great practice for when we would do it for real. While we were doing our prep I got to see a few manatees. They like to spend time in the area we are docked.
We started around 8am Saturday morning. I helped the engineer get the engine fired up. We also setup the generators and took out the shore power. We went about 8 miles offshore, and dropped the CTD in to get some samples. The seas were pretty rough, but it still went really well. We ended up doing 2 different CTD deployments throughout the day. We also deployed two different nets to collect micro plastics and we dragged another to collect plankton. After we finished collecting the samples we headed back to port. On the way we saw a pod of dolphins ride the bow wake. We will do another similar trip Sunday as well. 