Yesterday and today are the first since the day after our dive checkouts that no one in our group has been in the water. We were restricted to diving right off the station the first day of that run by winds too high for boating, and then had a virtually unheard of 12 straight days of low winds that allowed us to get out to the islands in and near Arthur Harbor. It has been snowing the last two days so the surface visibility has been low. Nevertheless, we could have gone out diving had we needed to. But our good fortune with weather has actually put us behind enough in our laboratory work that we all felt we needed a few days to concentrate on lab assays. To be honest, though, diving here is darn hard work and both divers and tenders needed a break.
The group's last two dives were both by Katrin and me at Eichorst Island. Eichorst is named for "Ike" Eichorst, an amateur radio operator who volunteered countless hours over many, many years running ham radio phone patches so that Palmer Station personnel could talk to friends and loved ones at home. It scares me a little to realize that just over 20 years ago I was sitting in my dorm room in Durham N.C. talking through static crackle and overlapping, multilingual interference to my then fiancé and now spouse, Maggie, via Ike Eichorst radio patches. That was when Maggie was on the first of her 12 trips to Palmer Station and way before the satellite phones or Internet connections we have now. Amateur radio operators like Ike were the only communication line for folks here to reach people like me at home. It gives me great pleasure, all these years later, to have an important part of my science linked to diving collections we've made at the island named in Ike's honor.
Our dives at Eichorst were beautiful. The first was on a rock wall that dropped into the darkness well below our maximum dive depth of 115 feet. Our second dive was further west on a shallow ledge where, on a dive about 10 days ago, Katrin had spotted a small brown alga of special interest to her work. So we made a shorter second dive on that shallow ledge dedicated to collecting a sufficient quantity of the small but important alga. Both the ledge and the wall were biologically rich and visually stunning. But, frankly, we were more whooped than normal when we got back on the boat after the second dive. Most days we only make one dive per person and have yet to attempt more than two per day on this trip.
Just after we pulled ourselves out of the water, I jokingly asked Katrin if she was ready for our third dive. Her immediate reply was, "Why don't you guys write grants to work in the tropics!?!?" Jim, who was tending, and I both agreed that wasn't a bad idea. So before we called into the station to inform them that the divers were back on the surface, I told Andy, who was manning the radio and also tending, to tell them that we were leaving Eichorst and heading to the Bahamas at the divers' insistence. He did, and without missing a beat, Chip, the station communications coordinator, replied, "copy that; leaving Eichorst for the Bahamas."
This ain't the Bahamas. The descriptions you have been reading on this Web site of our dives accurately, but even at that, inadequately, portray the lush undersea communities we are visiting on the dives. As a biologist, this is wonderful. But as I said above, it is darn hard work too. We have the mechanics down to a drill. Well, more accurately, a series of drills that make everything work safely and smoothly. No leopard seal cliff hanger this time, but still a three part story. Part two will be about the tools we use to dive here and part three the mechanics of using them.
