4 Nights at Sea is Not Enough for Me!

Last week, our interns and I departed on the R/V Point Sur along with 10 undergraduate students participating in REU programs at LSU and 3 other scientists for a multi-day undergraduate training cruise as part of the MissDelta Initiative. We planned this cruise for the start of our REU but due to poor weather, we shifted it to last week and we got back to Mississippi on Monday. Our goal for this trip was to train undergraduate students in marine operations, science at sea, and to show them new sampling techniques and equipment that they may not experience otherwise. Overall, we conducted multiple sediment cores using a multicorer (8 cores per deployment), gravity cores, and CTD casts with niskin bottles to collect water samples for our work. Our students had a full hands-on experience, wearing hard hats and PPE to conduct marine operations, deploy and retrieve gear, and process water samples in the onboard laboratory (PPE not required). 

We conducted field operations on our way to the Mississippi River, where we stayed just outside of the river to perform some sediment coring and water sampling before sailing up the river to Venice, LA. In Venice, we welcomed aboard a group of 15 additional students and scientists who had a 1-day trip with us where they learned from our students and conducted the same field work that our students practiced the day before. It was hot, muddy, salty, but the onboard food was delicious, the smiles and laughter contagious, and the screams during the World Cup Finals loud. The students got the opportunity to network with scientists, meet other undergraduates from across the Gulf Coast, and learn from experienced research and maritime professionals about life and work at sea.

We have close to 500 pictures from the cruise, but I think this one is a contender for my favorite, as it shows the students hard at work on day 1, learning how to set a CTD for deployment. This CTD is what we use on research vessels to collect water quality data and when we lower it overboard via a winch, we can close the niskin bottles at any depth via a computer trigger to collect uncontaminated water samples. 

---