A full day of mooring deployments from R/V Oceanus! A beautiful day with a little fog in the morning, but lots of sunshine in the afternoon. Lots of sea life out here including seabirds lined up in long rows at the internal wave fronts, pelicans patrolling by, sea lions, a whale slapping its tail, and a BIG mola mola. Nice to see our Scripps friends give us a drive by early this morning. We waved at Falk and company. Below is a photo of our crowded navigation chart. It’s black with mooring marks! The photo of Johannes Becherer is with the new 3D GusT, ready to deploy on a lander. Watch out you turbulent patches! The other photos are all of mooring OC32N-T being deployed. Our Oceanus Martech Brandon D’Andrea is front and center, including guiding GusTs over the side. Undergraduate student Raelynn Heinitz is now a mooring deployment expert and cotter pin bender extraordinaire. Tonight we’ll get our towed,undulating platform wet and do some water column tows with it and the side-mounted ADCP. Tomorrow it’s off to install our part of the Vandenberg array.

–Jack Barth and Jim Lerczak and the Oceanus gang

(all photos by Jack Barth)