April 17th, 2003; Leg 4, Day #14

As we steam into La Paz, we are busily packing the lab and cleaning our staterooms to ready them for the next leg. We wish Charlie Paull and his science crew our best wishes for good weather and scientific success during in their leg. We had excellent weather during our leg. The temperatures were comfortable, and the winds were calm except for a few days at the northern and southern limits of our expedition. The 25 mph winds during our last dive at the 21˚ North East Pacific Rise site prevented us from deploying the elevator. The elevator is a platform that is lowered to the bottom on a cable and released. We have sample boxes on board for our animal collections. At the end of the dive the elevator is released, and it floats passively to the surface when the R/V Western Flyer crew recover it. Unfortunately, the winds prevented deployment, and we had to quickly redesign the sample basket to accommodate our objectives.  The dive was successful, which speaks well of the flexibility and cooperation seen in the science team and the pilots. 

I thank them all for a very successful expedition. Also, I wish to thank Susan Von Thun, who has managed the video annotation team during the whole expedition. Susan put in many long hours patiently training other workers. Her breadth of biological knowledge impressed me. I frequently asked her to identify many of the fish and mid-water creatures we saw during our dives. Thanks Susan. 

The leg 4 scientific party:

Top row from left: Peter Girguis, Josh Plant, Susan Von Thun, Shana Goffredi, Mike Henry, Bob Vrijenhoek.

Bottom row from left: Amanda Bates, Jean Marcus, Dave Clague, Joe Jones.