Day 12/13 - There's a lot of poop talk in this post

Every time I think I'm done crashing out, I'm compelled to crash out again.

^^^That was going to be my entire post, but after reading everyone's very kind comments last post, I decided to be more thorough. Y'all are very sweet, and I miss my land people. It's a weird social thing out here. You are almost always with people; there's 56 people on board and it can be hard to find somewhere to get away. But it is also lonely, because all these people aren't my people.

And since we're all friends out here, I will give some insight into this expedition, which is the first to be funded by the State Department instead of NOAA. And it has changed the vibe of the ship entirely. Now there's extra scrutiny on the work and extra people on board, and it has made everyone extremely tense. Last time I was out at sea felt like a bunch of pals on an adventure, and this time feels like people are going to start yelling at each other. And you all know I'm sensitive.

Nobody is going to yell at me though. I was gifted a bar of chocolate today for all my extra work. Not sure the chocolate was worth the crash out, but it's good to know I'm not next on the list to get blown up on.

Now let's get into the details of how things are going. Some things are improving. I went outside, and I finally pooped. Some things are not improving, like discovering that my toilet doesn't flush after finally being able to poop. So that wasn't my favorite conversation to have with the ship's chief engineer.

Anyways, I've just been out here doing science things. I don't have much to show today, all of my pictures are of labels and notebooks and boring things. Here's a picture of the control room while collecting a sample:

Today we also did our first CTD cast. It measures conductivity, temperature, and depth, and is important for studying ocean circulation and for correcting sonar data. It also has twenty four 5 liter bottles to collect water samples, which we used to study environmental DNA and on this cruise we're also measuring d13C. I spent five hours today filtering for eDNA, I'm glad we're only doing 2 more CTD casts this cruise. The CTD rosette looks like this (which is an example, if you're like WHY DOESN'T THIS HAVE 24 BOTTLES?? I don't have a picture of ours but I can try next time):

I also realized I haven't shown you all a fun link, which is the NOAA Data Atlas. You can check this to see where the ship is in real time. Everyone always asks Where are you? or Where are you going? like I have a single idea where the heck I am. Somewhere in the ocean. So check the link.

We're also doing another ROV dive tomorrow. It's another shakedown dive, so I haven't been encouraging you all to check out the live feed, but I'll share it now and over the next few weeks this is where you can see the dive video. It just might not be super interesting tomorrow. While we're not streaming, the videos will play highlights from old dives. Here's the link to that.

Alrighty, that's all for now. I genuinely have no idea what day this actually is, so hopefully tomorrow I can use my brain and figure it out. Thanks for being here.