Heads up, and a trip to Kauai

The 4800-meter heads (6 of them) came up last night, and today I finally got to see them.  They defied my expectations.  What’s amazing (to me and scientists on board) is how DIFFERENT they turned out.  Mr. Hayslip is the big winner – his head shrunk beautifully and everyone’s impressed with his artwork, his vision, and I think especially his use of negative space.  “You see, it IS art, and it IS science”, as one eloquent scientist put it. (That’s eloquent, for a scientist.)

The others are a mixed bag (idiom, although oddly literal, too).  On the right in this picture is the 1000-meter head from an earlier post, included just for scale.  Many didn’t shrink as much as expected, and several got split open painfully at eye level.  No one fully understands the variations.  Some blame it on the arrangement in the bag (some heads were up against metal rods, others squished between heads), and some suspect there’s enough variation between the heads to make this happen.  They want to get to the bottom of this (idiom), so many asked me if they all came from the same manufacturer, and I believe they did.  But I suppose wig models don’t require a high level of uniform density or anything.  Who knows? 

The other news is that we collected a wandering float.  This float, called an ARGOS float (in case you care to google it) has been out to collect scientific data, but it’s not working properly.  It needed picked up, and when we left ‘O’ahu, it was very near station ALOHA.  It wasn’t our primary scientific goal, though, so we saved it for later while we did science.  However, while we worked, a current moved the float.  Now we finally found it north of Kauai, and we’ve just recovered it.  When it’s on the surface, it talks to satellites so we had some clues to locate it. The side trip wound up taking a great deal of extra time (I think something like 10 hours).  Perhaps we should have picked it up at the beginning of the trip.  But you know the old idiom: hindsight is always 20/20. 

Our hope was to do one last rosette cast at station Kaena tonight.  This is where we’d send the 1000-meter heads down for a second dip to 2500 meters.  It’s also where I’d like to get the cups in the water.  However, with this long side trip, the Kaena cast might not happen at all.  Wait and see.  As of this writing, it looks more likely than not.