My awesome roomie, Kaylyn, gets to dive everyday we are at an island, while I stay on the ship. The divers come back in the late afternoon with amazing stories of all they saw that day. She shared these photos with me of some amazing marine life at Howland.

Thanks again to Kaylyn for this gorgeous photo from one of her dives

My mom's a good luck charm

My mom wrote me an email last night that she and my dad were going out for sushi. She said, "Lucky you, you can get sushi right outside of your room." I wrote her that we never get sushi on here. We get Mahi and Ono from time to time but they get cooked up (and they are AWESOME). Once on here, a while ago, we had a bloody little tuna, but not true ahi sushi. Well, that changed today! Fish on! And it was a nice sized Ahi!

The above photo is another catch, an Ono, being dissected...a mackerel head in its' stomach, and you may be able to see the two little parasites crawling around. According to the fish biologist pictured, that is healthy. I watched this dissection as I was chewing my piece of Ahi sushi, about 1/2 hour before dinner...now that is what I call a pupu! Then for dinner-Mahi that had been caught the day prior!

And here is Danny, enjoying the sushi!

In transit to Howland and Baker islands (they are very close to each other). We will be working there from the 11th-16th. For the past few days the seas have been rockin-I am not sure if that is captured in this picture that I just snapped. We are doing the pinball dance down the hallways. This view is off the stern, and you can see a few of our small boats, which are launched every operations day for the divers to go do their work in shallower areas, where the ship can't go. All is well but transit days can seem long..and of course sometimes ops days seem too tiring. So I am trying to embrace the downtime while we have it!

My CTD (...my bread and butter) has been acting up this cruise. Here is the Electronics Tech coming to my rescue; he found a damaged wire inside the winch and is replacing it here. We won't know if this was the main culprit until we can put her in the water...hopefully in a couple of days-we're in transit now. And you thought it was all dolphins and pretty coral... :)

Kicking off the Big Ol SAMOA trip

sunset last night

We set sail this past Monday, Feb. 27th, for Samoa. We return to Honolulu May 23rd and in the meantime will be visiting some GORGEOUS places. This first leg of the trip has us stopping at Johnston, Howland, Baker and Swains islands. We actually just arrived at Johnston today and my CTD operations start tonight...of course I have been busy so far running my other systems after a long winter in port.

We pull in to American Samoa for a nice long in port (a week!) on March 24th, which believe it or not, does not seem too far off at the moment. The winter in port in Honolulu was lovely (and I got some great surfing on the north shore just before we left, along with some hiking and good eats!) and I was a bit anxious about sailing again. But I have to say, now that we are out, I am really loving it. Seeing nothing but the gorgeous blue swells, stars, sunsets, even the rain and winds kicking up, is amazing, and pretty hard to describe. Sometimes it can feel stifling to be on a ship with 48 people and to not have some of the comforts we get used to, like picking what and when you eat, long walks...privacy! But the simplicity of being out here replaces a lot of the inconveniences, and many of the people (like my great roommate!) make the tough days easier.

I am doing a lot of reading, exercising, art, yoga, chatting and WORK of course. I am also staring at my new sewing machine, intimidated, but have a friend on here ready to help and an awesome DVD from mom. I have no more excuses! I hope over the next three months I can post some beautiful shots of where we are and some that depict what we do out here. And maybe by May I will post a completed sewing project!

Lots of love. Hope each of you currently have the equivalent of smooth seas in your lives. -L