We have arrived in Puerto Rico! The first leg of this cruise has come to an end. During this past 8 days I have held the night shift (1500-0300) with my mentor, Nick. This was an adjustment since I am normally more of a morning person, but I made it through. Sleeping most of the day until my shift began later in the day.
During this cruise the main piece of equipment deployed was the CTD, where it would be deployed down to the bottom of the ocean. As we got closer to Puerto Rico the depths we were sending the CTD down were in the 5000 meters range. Our last station where we deployed the CTD was in the Puerto Rico Trench, which is located on the boundary between the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean and has maximum depth of 8,648 meters. Although when we got here, there we only sent the CTD down to 6000 meters, since that was the maximum depth for some of the senors we had it. Other deployments that were done during this leg were zooplankton tows and saito-pumps.
CTD being deployed
During the times that were transiting to the next station or while we wer wating for a CTD to come back to the surface, I worked on raspberry pi. This is a small single-board computer that is used to help learn about programming though various projects. I was able to make a light turn on and off along with various other projects, using linux and python, two computer coding languages. I am still just beginning to understand them, but through the practice of the different prrojects I am understanding a lot more than I started out knowing (which was none).
Maya working on Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi breadboard set up
Image taken by Nick Mathews
We are have the rest of today and the morning of tomorrow off. Then it is time to head back to Bermuda.