End of Cruise

       The cruise is coming to an end and we are heading into Victoria this afternoon. It was a bumpy night, but the sky is now clear and the sun is out! Land, here we come!
       The glider was recovered on Monday, after spending about 1 week taking CTD readings and relaying them back to the ship via satellite. It anyone is interested in the data it sent back, here’s the link: http://marine.rutgers.edu/cool/auvs/index.php?pid=46 . I went up to the bridge to help sight the glider after it surfaced and I thought I saw it right away. But it turned out that yellow thing I thought I saw wasn’t a glider… False alarm!
       Earlier in the week, I rode in the rescue boat to recover a transponder that had been cut from the sea floor. It was pretty amazing to have been in the ROV control room to watch the transponder get cut, then have to pull in 60m of slime-covered line in order to recover it. Note: Next time bring gloves.
       New snow blowers were also discovered in the past few days, one of which was more massive than any of the previous ones found. I was at the camera controls when we stumbled across one… This was the most amazing thing I had ever seen on a T.V. The white microbes drifting out of the hole in the seafloor looked like stars; the entire scene looked like some sort of galaxy.
Last night was poetry night, for which we all shared our own creations or read from a stack of books. The night was a great way to end our time on station, and now we’re headed into Victoria for the last night of the cruise!