This trip is off to a good start, we left Lewes on the 30th and headed east to an eddy just west of the Gulf Stream where we hoped to find rain. We spent our first full day out there going through the motions of everything that would happen over the cruise. We practice with our CTD, a clean CTD, the tow fish and drifters. The scientists on this trip are looking at all different things so we are using lots of different sampling methods. We have been doing 2-4 casts per day with the boat CTD fireing all the bottles on most of them. Science is filtering and sampling this water looking at primary productivity. There is another group of scientists looking at trace metal in the water; which is why we have the clean CTD on board. This is a CTD that they brought with them and is put over using a clean winch that has been repainted and coated so there is no metal being introduced. It uses a plastic covered metal wire to lower the CTD. Unlike our CTD the wire is not connected back to the computers so it must be pre programed for when the bottles will fire and you cannot look at the data as it goes down or comes up. We are using a side frame on the back deck to lower the CTD over the side of the boat. Also on the side frame is the tow fish, another sampling method. It looks like a silver torpedo dragging behind a set of wings. In the center of the wings there is a plastic tube that runs up the towline and on deck. Once on deck the plastic tubing runs through a pump and into the lab vans where they can take samples from it periodically. The final piece of equipment we are using are three drifters. They are about three foot long PVC pipes with flashing lights and floats on the top and weights on the bottom connected to a 30ft long tube of black netting. The drifter sits on the surface and the black netting sinks down bellow it in the water column. This causes the drifters to follow the water just bellow the surface instead on the surface water. After this first practice day we got into a daily routine and waited for the rain, which was going well up until the 2nd, when the winch for the clean CTD shorted out, spitting sparks out of the power supply. The winch was no longer in operation. We continued with our routine, minus the clean CTD for a few more days and made our way back into Lewes on the 5th. Unfortunately it only rained once while we were out on the first part of the trip and we have not collected as much rain as science had hoped to. We got in around two and spent the afternoon getting a new winch set up and ready to go, the new winch dose does not have any metering devise on it so Ted and I had to mark the 300 meters of line for the CTD with spray paint every 10m. Then we refueled, had a crew change and had some pizza for dinner and waited for the next high tide, we left Lewis around 4 am, today we are steaming back to where we left one of the drifters in the water to pick up where we left off, hoping for some rain