shrinking cups and catching fish

While I slept last night, the lab deployed a deep cast (sending instruments way down to 4800 meters, near the sea floor) and included with the package a net bag containing styrofoam cups many of us had decorated. Large drinking cups came up the size of thimbles, and the artwork looks better after the shrinking kind of intensities the color (a la shrinky dinks).

Around breakfast time the morning, we reached the buoy that I helped deploy last year. (Perhaps helped is too strong a word.) We're here to drop some shipboard instruments next to the instruments dangling from the buoy for the sake of comparison and calibration. But as long as we're here, no harm in taking advantage of the fact that life swarms around the buoy. Slime and barnacles and worms grow on the instruments, little fish come to eat those, and then big fish come to eat the little ones. The ship did two passes by the buoy. On the first pass, 3 mahimahi were caught, and on the second pass, a third came aboard. I'm not sure what will happen to the fish. I think it's generally eaten during the cruise (poke or fillets for dinner?) but perhaps the fishermen will take these home since it is so close to the end of the trip. I'll keep you posted.

Aloha,
Patricia