We made it back to Lewis and off loaded the science crew from the second cruise and loaded the scientist for my final trip. The scientists on this final trip were pretty self sufficient and got most of their gear on themselves. We left Lewis early in the morning on the 18th and spent all day transiting to a site just bellow the Bay Bridge. We stopped every two salinity points as we made our way up the bay and did a CTD cast to get a profile and fire a couple of bottles. Once we got to the site we dropped anchor and did another CTD and did the first of many pump casts. This is a metal frame with different equipment attached to it and a pump to collect water samples. It needed to be lowered over the side of the boat a meter or so at a time, but the winch had no metering device and the metering block was broken. One turn of the winch drum was about 2.5m so I would watch a piece of tape on the drum go around and guess when the appropriate amount of wire had been paid out, which is apparently a hidden talent I have because I got fairly good at it by the end of the trip. The next two days were a repeat of the pump profiler and CTD casts on repeat. The CTD profiles we got while at anchor were some of the coolest I saw while on the boat. We were anchored in an anoxic hole and when the CTD when down to a point the oxygen readings would drop to zero. Today we did some multi coring which was a very cool, very messy process. We sent the multi coreer over twice and completely messed up the cores on the first one and then got some good ones on the second try. The hole apparatus is a metal frame with a top and a bottom part that are locked open when it is not in use. There are 4 plexi glass tubes around the frame that when they dig into the mud and the bottom part gets pushed up into the top it triggers the tubes to close and collect the mud. The tricky part is getting the samples out once back on deck. It was a messy process and after some trial and error we finally figured it out and all went well. The rest of the day consisted of more CTD’s and pump casts and lots of popsicles. I got to make a trip in on the small boat today and on the way back I got some good pictures of the boat!