West Coast Expedition
July 20 - August 30, 2002
West Coast of North America
Logbook
August 5, 2002: Day #17
Debra Stakes writes: The ship departed Newport at 0700. Almost immediately after exiting the harbor we ran into a downpour. An hour later we were once again sailing on calm seas with a clear blue sky. We have over 24 hours of transit before our first dive site and so are busy with getting gear and notebooks organized before the dives begin. Yesterday the pilots wanted us to put everything onto the toolsled and drawer that we planned to take down on the first dive. It was a great exercise-in frustration. It doesn’t all fit! We had to do lots of compromising to come up with a reduced list of samplers. We plan to use two of the ICL-controlled gas tights, the manifold fluid sampler, and the mechanically-triggered gas tight and Ti-syringe fluid samplers. All of the fluid collection will be completed early in the dive and we hope to send several of the bottles back to the surface in an elevator. After the vent field sampling is done, we will transect east with the magnetometer running continuously as we drive over the bottom. Now that we are underway, we are planning the watch schedules, training the watch standers and having the pilots remind us how to use the camera system effectively.
