This morning when I woke up I was surprised to see calm seas. Yesterday was rough weather, the winds got up to 27 knot winds with 5ft swells which made for rough seas mixed in with some rain. Good thing we all have our sea legs by now! A piece of framing from the box corer got ripped off during sampling and we ended up having to use a Van Veen to collect our samples. It has a similar design to the box corer, but is designed more to scoop up sediment and does not bring up as much pore water. We were still able to collect some samples though! Dr. Hammerschmidt was up late with the ship's technicans working on the box corer but they were able to get everything fixed. They say it should work even better than before!

Right now we are at station 12 which is about 3200 meters deep. There havn't been many scientist that have box cored this deep to study methyl mercury so this is a big step for us! It should take about 1 hour for the box corer to go down, and another hour to recover so hopefully all goes well!

This morning we began to pack up some of our science equipment and samples that don't need to be kept cool. Tomorrow will be our last full day at sea, we will be back on land sometime Wednesday afternoon. I can't believe the trip is almost over, I'm going to miss the ocean so much once I'm back in Ohio!

-Katlin