November 27th

Today was a sad day. It was the last day that we were able to enjoy Dan and Jonna's company because they fly out tomorrow. They packed their personal gear in the morning while Craig, Stacy, and I packed up things in the lab. Then we went diving at Cinder Cones to see how the enrichment experiment was faring. It was neat to see small square piles of seastars on the seafloor where we had dumped the organics from the failed experiment. There was some change to the working experiment that the time lapse video camera was filming. We will revisit the experiment later to track further changes.

After Cinder Cones, we continued further down the road to a new site at Little Razorback. The dive was beautiful, with large white sponges almost dwarfing Craig. Unfortunately, I had a few gear failures and had to abort the dive early. After Craig and Stacy escorted me to the hole they continued on and played around on the shallow shelf. There is a large tidal crack there that attracts a lot of seals, and two visited them while they were in the shallows. It is the time of year when males are competing for a mate and they often will fight one another. Luckily Stacy and Craig didn't have any such encounters. I found out later that Craig was always keeping Stacy between another seal and himself (nice buddy). (That's the abuse I get for turning her air off at 100'... no, wait... Ed.)

As a tribute to Dan and Jonna I would like to share some silly, and not so silly, photos of them. It has been wonderful working with them and we will miss their silly antics.