Hello again, blog readers. We had our personnel transfer and our educational outreach yesterday, right after each other. We sailed up to St. Paul island and ran a few people to shore and came back with even less. My bird watching roommate was among those leaving but since he's gone, there has been no replacement in my quarters, so I was able to snag that giant poofy pillow he found somewhere. Sleeping is so much more relaxing now that my pillow doesn't deflate whenever I lay my head down.

After the crew switch, we sailed on down to St. George island for that educational outreach deal we had going on. I hadn't seen the islands before so I thought to go up and check them out, but the fog cover was so thick that I couldn't hardly see anything at all. In fact, I heard from one of the people who went ashore that they had to stop their little boat in between the Healy and St. George and wait for the sound of the fog horn so they could find out which way they were supposed to be going. In essence, the fog was so thick that they lost their way in between the ship and the island. It wasn't that far at all, but the fog seemed to get worse as the day rolled on. To think that I wanted to snap a picture of the island. Anyway, as part of the deal, some select members of our scientific crew were able to go to the island and give a little educational presentation while some of their high school kids were able to come out to the Healy for pillage and adventure on the high seas...wait, that's not right. My mistake. That's our job. The kids came out for an afternoon of learning exactly what we do day in and day out, sans pillage and plunder. I was sleeping by this time because I'd been up all night, but from what I can gather, the weather turned south and both groups had to go back to their respective original places ahead of schedule. Our shorebound scientists had their presentations cut short and the high schoolers had their tour end prematurely. They didn't even get to play with the liquid nitrogen so we took the brunt of that responsibility upon ourselves and dipped assorted foodstuffs in it. From the pictures I saw, the corn dogs shattered like glass. It was pretty "cool".

This evening was like any other. I slept in really late, like to eleven in the night, so I got up to check when our nets were going out. It turned out to be around three in the morning but since there were iron sampling CTD runs, which take a long time because they have to equilibrate to iron levels in the water, we had to wait nearly two hours before we could suit up and head out. The MOCNESS was about the same as it has always been, except instead of sampling in 40 meters of water, we were going down to 120 meters. We got plenty of samples in our sampling net catcher buckets, with some of it looking like zooplankton porridge. Very thick and kind of gross looking. Kind of like the vomit of someone who just got back from an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet. It was very cold outside and by the time we were finished and all wet, the wind started picking up. Thankfully we were finished so we headed back inside. It was only an hour before breakfast so we took a break, and by taking a break, I mean I listened to a few tunes of mine before I hit the chow. I came up here right afterwards and since I'm finished for today I'm going back to bed for another afternoon of blissful slumber only made better by my awesome new pillow. Take it easy blog readers and tune in next time.