By: Darcy Perin
The last two weeks have been another big blur of sampling, sampling, sampling. We have moved outside of the ODZ, and we are currently heading to station 49. We are moving northward along the coast of Baja, slowly approaching San Diego, and the end of our journey. We will dock in San Diego on Friday January 21st. We have a few more stations to complete before finishing up, but a majority of this week will be spent packing up, sorting out shipments and cleaning. For the past two days we’ve had our first full days of transit without sampling, and it was nice to take the weekend, and catch up on some homework, watch obscure movies (sailors have interesting taste in movies), and play several rounds of Catan. In the past week I have completed most of my noble gas sampling, and we are down to our last 25 N2O bottles. Crazy to think we started out with almost 900. During our packing and cruise prep we had only packed for max 25 stations, and we’re about to double that! I didn’t think we’d use all these bottles at first, but I’m glad we were able to plan appropriately and not run out. We have a lot of analysis ahead of us! I’m going to miss being at sea, so I am go to savior these last few days of deep blue water, friends, and not having to cook for myself.
